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BOOKS BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL 

Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



THE LAST FRONTIER: The White Man's 
War for Civilization in Africa. Illus- 
trated. 8vo net $1.50 

GENTLEMEN ROVERS. Illustrated. 

8vo net $1.50 

THE END OF THE TRAIL. Illustrated. 
8vo net $3.00 

FIGHTING IN FLANDERS. Illustrated. 

i2mo net $1.25 

THE ROAD TO GLORY. Illustrated. 

8vo net $1.50 

VTVE LA FRANCE I Illustrated. 

i2irto net $1.25 

ITALY AT WAR: AND THE ALLIES IN THE 

West. Illustrated. i2mo . ... net $1.50 



ITALY AT WAR 




The King of Italy and the Prince of Wales. 

When the Prince was on the Italian front, he asked permission to visit a trench 
which was being heavily shelled. The King bluntly refused. "I want no 
historic incidents here," he remarked dryly. 



ITALY AT WAR 



AND THE ALLIES IN THE WEST 



BY 
E. ALEXANDER POWELL 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1917 



^\1 






COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published May, 1917 



MAY 3i 1917 




©CI. A 46275 5 K 



fr- 



ou» V 



TO 

THEIR EXCELLENCIES 

COUNT V. MACCHI DI CELLERE, AMBASSADOR OF ITALY, 
AND JEAN JULES JUSSERAND, AMBASSADOR OF FRANCE 

IN APPRECIATION OF THE MANY 
KINDNESSES THEY HAVE SHOWN 
ME AND IN ADMIRATION OF THE 
TACT, SINCERITY, AND ABILITY 
WHICH HAVE WON FOR THEM, AND 
FOR THE COUNTRIES THEY REP- 
RESENT, THE FRIENDSHIP AND 
CONFIDENCE OF ALL AMERICANS 



AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

For the assistance they have given me in the 
preparation of this book, and for the countless 
kindnesses they have shown me, I am indebted 
to many persons in many countries. 

His Excellency Count Macchi di Cellere, 
Italian Ambassador to the United States; Sig- 
nor Giuseppe Brambilla, Counsellor of Embassy; 
Signor A. G. Celesia, Secretary of Embassy; 
his Excellency Thomas Nelson Page, Ameri- 
can Ambassador to Italy, and the members of 
his staff; Signor Tittoni, former Italian Ambas- 
sador to France; Signor de Martino, Chef du 
Cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; his 
Excellency Signor Scialoje, Minister of Educa- 
tion; Professor Andrea Galante, Chief of the 
Bureau of Propaganda; Colonel Barberiche and 
Captain Pirelli of the Comando Supremo, and 
Signor Ugo Ojetti, in charge of works of art in 
the war zone, all have my grateful thanks for 
the exceptional facilities afforded me for obser- 
vation on the Italian front. 



viii AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

His Excellency M. Jusserand, French Am- 
bassador to the United States, General Nivelle, 
General Gouraud, and General Dubois; Mon- 
sieur Henri Ponsot, Chief of the Press Bureau, 
and Professor Georges Chinard, Chief of the 
Bureau of Propaganda of the Ministry of For- 
eign Affairs; Commandant Bunau-Varilla and 
the Marquis d'Audigne all helped to make this 
the most interesting and instructive of my 
many visits to the French front. 

To General Jilinsky, commanding the Rus- 
sian forces in France, and to Colonel Romanoff, 
his Chief of Staff, I am grateful for the courte- 
sies extended to me while on the Russian front 
in Champagne. 

Lord Northcliffe, who on innumerable occa- 
sions has shown himself a friend, Lord Robert 
Cecil, Minister of Blockade, and Sir Theodore 
Andrea Cook, Editor of The Field, put them- 
selves to much trouble in arranging for my 
visit to the British front. Nor have I forgotten 
the kindnesses shown me by Captain C. H. 
Roberts and Lieutenant C. S. Fraser, my hosts 
at General Headquarters. 

For the many privileges extended to me dur- 
ing my visit to the Belgian front I take this 



AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT ix 

opportunity of thanking his Excellency Baron 
de Broqueville, Prime Minister of Belgium; 
M. Emanuel Havenith, former Belgian Minis- 
ter to the United States, Lieutenant-General 
Jacquez, commanding the third division of the 
Belgian Army; Capitaine-Commandant Vin- 
cotte, and Capitaine-Commandant Maurice 
Le Due of the £tat-Major. 

To Lieutenant-Colonel Spencer Cosby, Corps 
of Engineers, United States Army, I owe my 
thanks for much of the technical information 
contained in Chapter V, as he generously placed 
at my disposal the extremely valuable material 
which he collected during his three years of ser- 
vice as American Military Attache in Paris. 

James Hazen Hyde, Esq., who accompanied 
me on my visit to the Italian front, has, by his 
hospitality and kindness, placed me under obli- 
gations which I can never fully repay. I could 
have had no more charming or cultured trav- 
elling companion. 

I also wish to acknowledge the information 
and suggestions I have derived from Sydney 
Low's admirable book, "Italy in the War"; 
from R. W. Seton-Watson's "The Balkans, 
Italy, and the Adriatic"; from V. Gayda's 



x AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT 

"Modern Austria"; from Dr. E. J. Dillon's 
"From the Triple to the Quadruple Alliance"; 
from Pietro Fedele's "Why Italy Is at War," 
and from E. D. Ushaw's "Railways at the 
Front." 

And, finally, I desire to thank Howard E. 
Coffin, Esq., of the Advisory Board of the 
Council of National Defence, for his hospitality 
on his sea island of Sapeloe, where most of this 
book was written. 

E. Alexander Powell. 

Washington, 
April fifteenth, 1917. 





CONTENTS 




AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT 


PAGE 

vii 


CHAPTER 
I. 


THE WAY TO THE WAR 


I 


II. 


WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 


31 


III. 


FIGHTING ON THE ROOF OF EU- 
ROPE 


59 


IV. 


THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 


91 


V. 


WITH THE RUSSIANS IN CHAM- 
PAGNE 


121 


VI. 


"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 


136 



VII. "THAT CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE 

ARMY" 179 

VIII. WITH THE BELGIANS ON THE 

YSER 222 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The King of Italy and the Prince of Wales .... Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

The Telef erica 4 

An Italian Position in the Carnia 5 

The Work of the Hun 12 

Waiting for Big Game • • 13 

An Air Raid (Bombs Dropping) 20 

An Air Raid (Bombs Bursting) . . . 21 

The King of Italy and General Cadorna at Castelnuovo . 28 

The Peril in the Clouds • 29 

A Sentinel of the Sky 32 

The Night Patrol 33 

As Seen by an Airman 3*> 

Soldiers of the Snows 37 

The Carnia 44 

TheStelvio 45 

Alpini Going Into Action 48 

On the Roof of the World 49 

xiii 



xiv ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Two Miles Above Sea-Level 50 

A Trench in the Trentino 51 

A Sky-Company of Alpini , 62 

The Winter War 63 

Alpini in Action 66 

Where Ambulances Cannot Go 67 

A Heavy Howitzer in the High Alps 78 

An Outpost in the Carnia 79 

The Telef erica Station on Mount Stoll 84 

Amid the Eternal Snows 85 

"Portable Trenches" 92 

"Portable Trenches" 93 

Like Knights of the Middle Ages 98 

In Bombarded Gorizia 99 

The Crossing of the Isonzo no 

The Crossing of the Isonzo in 

"Gas!" u6 

French Field-Gun Mounted for Use Against Aircraft ... 117 

"Halt! Show Your Papers!" 124 

A Nieuport Biplane About to Take the Air 125 

A Saucisse in the Snow . ; . 144 



ILLUSTRATIONS xv 

FACING PAGE 

The Eyes of the Guns 145 

Verdun's Mightiest Defender: a 400-mm. Gun 148 

A Gun Painted to Escape the Observation of Enemy Airmen 149 

A New Type of French Howitzer in Action near Verdun . 156 

One of the Guns that Held Verdun for France 157 

French Infantry Attacking a German Position in Cham- 
pagne 160 

A French 305 in Action on the Somme 161 

The Chateau de Deniecourt 176 

"We Must Make Pudding of the German Trenches" . . . 177 

Australians on the Way to the Trenches 180 

The Fire Trench 181 

"Erin-Go-Bragh!" 188 

The Real Organizers of Victory: the Railway-Builders . . 189 

Poker and Potential Destruction 192 

British Infantry Advancing to Support an Attack .... 193 

The Offensive on the Somme 214 

Mud is a Vital Factor in War 215 

"The Frontier of Civilization" 218 

A British "Heavy" Mounted on a Railway-Truck Shelling 

the German Lines 219 

Buried on the Field of Honor 226 



xvi ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

The Trail of the Hun 227 

Flanders 238 

A Photograph of Dixmude Taken by a Belgian Aviator . 239 

A German Battle-Plane in Action 244 

An Echo of the Longest Range Bombardment in History . 245 

These illustrations are from photographs taken by the Photo- 
graphic Sections of the Italian, French, British, and Belgian 
armies and by the author. 



ITALY AT WAR 



I 

THE WAY TO THE WAR 

WHEN I told my friends that I was 
going to the Italian front they 
smiled disdainfully. "You will only 
be wasting your time," one of them warned 
me. "There isn't anything doing there," said 
another. And when I came back they greeted 
me with "You didn't see much, did you?" 
and "What are the Italians doing, anyway?" 

If I had time I told them that Italy is hold- 
ing a front which is longer than the French 
and British and Belgian fronts combined 
(trace it out on the map and you will find 
that it measures more than four hundred and 
fifty miles); that, alone among the Allies, she 
is doing most of her fighting on the enemy's 
soil; that she is fighting an army which was 
fourth in Europe in numbers, third in quality, 
and probably second in equipment; that in 
a single battle she lost more men than fell on 



2 ITALY AT WAR 

both sides at Gettysburg; that she has taken 
100,000 prisoners; that, to oppose the Aus- 
trian offensive in the Trentino, she mobilized 
a new army of half a million men, completely 
equipped it, and moved it to the front, all in 
seven days; that, were her trench lines care- 
fully ironed out, they would extend as far 
as from New York to Salt Lake City; that, 
instead of digging these trenches, she has had 
to blast most of them from the solid rock; 
that she has mounted 8-inch guns on ice- 
ledges nearly two miles above sea-level, in 
positions to which a skilled mountaineer would 
find it perilous to climb; that in places the in- 
fantry has advanced by driving iron pegs and 
rings into the perpendicular walls of rock 
and swarming up the dizzy ladders thus con- 
structed; that many of the positions can be 
reached only in baskets slung from sagging 
wires stretched across mile-deep chasms; that 
many of her soldiers are living like arctic 
explorers, in caverns of ice and snow; that on 
the sun-scorched floor of the Carso the bodies 
of the dead have frequently been found baked 
hard and mummified, while in the mountains 
they have been found stiff, too, but stiff from 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 3 

cold; that in the lowlands of the Isonzo the 
soldiers have fought in water to their waists, 
while the water for the armies fighting in the 
Trentino has had to be brought up from thou- 
sands of feet below; and, most important of 
all, that she has kept engaged some forty 
Austrian divisions (about 750,000 men) — a 
force sufficient to have turned the scale in 
favor of the Central Powers on any of the other 
fronts. And I have usually added:/ "After 
what I have seen over there, I feel like lifting 
my hat, in respect and admiration, to the next 
Italian that I see." | 

It is no exaggeration to say that not one 
American in a thousand has any adequate con- 
ception of what Italy is fighting for, nor any 
appreciation of the splendid part she is play- 
ing in the war. This lack of knowledge, and 
the consequent lack of interest, is, however, 
primarily due to the Italians themselves. They 
are suspicious of foreigners. They are by 
nature shy. More insular than the French or 
English, they are only just commencing to 
realize the political value of our national 
maxim: "It pays to advertise." Though they 
want publicity they do not know how to get it. 



4 ITALY AT WAR 

Instead of welcoming neutral correspondents 
and publicists, they have, until very recently, 
met them with suspicion and hinderances. 
What little news is permitted to filter through 
is coldly official, and is altogether unsuited for 
American consumption. The Italians are stag- 
ing one of the most remarkable and inspiring 
performances that I have seen on any front — 
a performance of which they have every reason 
to be proud — but diffidence and conservatism 
have deterred them from telling the world 
about it. 

To visit Italy in these days is no longer 
merely a matter of buying a ticket and board- 
ing a train. To comply with the necessary 
formalities takes the better part of a week. 
Should you, an American, wish to travel from 
Paris to Rome, for example, you must first of 
all obtain from the American consul-general a 
special vise for Italy, together with a statement 
of the day and hour on which you intend to 
leave Paris, the frontier station at which you 
will enter Italy, and the cities which you pro- 
pose visiting. The consul-general will require 
of you three carte-de-vis ite size photographs. 
Armed with your vised passport, you must then 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 5 

present yourself at the Italian Consulate, 
where several suave but very businesslike gen- 
tlemen will subject you to a series of extremely 
searching questions. And you can be per- 
fectly certain that they are in possession of 
enough information about you to check up 
your answers. Should it chance that your 
grandfather's name was Schmidt, or something 
equally German-sounding, it is all off. The 
Italians, I repeat, are a suspicious folk, and they 
are taking no chances. Moreover, unless you 
are able to convince them of the imperative 
necessity of your visiting Italy, you do not 
go. Tourists and sensation seekers are not 
wanted in Italy in these times; the railways 
are needed for other purposes. If, however, 
you succeed in satisfying the board of exam- 
iners that you are not likely to be either a 
menace or a nuisance, a special passport for 
the journey will be issued you. Three more 
photographs, please. This passport must then 
be indorsed at the Prefecture of Police. (Votre 
photographie, s'il vous plait.) Should you neg- 
lect to obtain the police vise you will not be 
permitted to board the train. 

Upon reaching the frontier you are ushered 



6 ITALY AT WAR 

before a board composed of officials of the 
French Service de Siirete and the Italian 
Questura and again subjected to a search- 
ing interrogatory. Every piece of luggage in 
the train is unloaded, opened, and carefully 
examined. It having been discovered that 
spies were accustomed to conceal in their com- 
partments any papers which they might be 
carrying, and retrieving them after the fron- 
tier was safely passed, the through trains have 
now been discontinued, passengers and luggage, 
after the examination at the frontier, being 
sent on by another train. In addition to 
the French and Italian secret-service officials, 
there are now on duty at the various frontier 
stations, and likewise in Athens, Naples, and 
Rome, keen-eyed young officers of the "Hush- 
Hush Brigade," as the British Intelligence De- 
partment is disrespectfully called, whose busi- 
ness it is to scrutinize the thousands of British 
subjects — officers returning frpm India, Egypt, 
or Salonika, or from service with the Mediter- 
ranean fleet, King's messengers, diplomatic 
couriers — who are constantly crossing Italy on 
their way to or from England. 

That the arm of the enemy is very long, and 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 7 

that it is able to strike at astounding distances 
and in the most unexpected places, is brought 
sharply home to one as the train pulls out of 
the Genoa station. From Genoa to Pisa, a 
distance of a hundred miles, the railway closely 
hugs the Mediterranean shore. At night all the 
curtains on that side of the train must be kept 
closely drawn and, as an additional precaution, 
the white electric-light bulbs in the corridors 
and compartments have been replaced by vio- 
let ones. If you isk the reason for this you 
are usually met with evasions. But, if you per- 
sist, you learn that it is done to avoid the 
danger of the trains being shelled by Austrian 
submarines ! (Imagine, if you please, the 
passengers on the New York-Boston trains 
being ordered to keep their windows darkened 
because enemy submarines have been reported 
off the coast.) In this war remoteness from the 
firing-line does not assure safety. Spezia, for 
example, which is a naval base of the first im- 
portance, is separated from the firing-line by 
the width of the Italian peninsula. Until a 
few months ago its inhabitants felt as snug and 
safe as though they lived in Spain. Then, one 
night, an Austrian airman crossed the Alps, 



8 ITALY AT WAR 

winged his way above the Lombard plain, and 
let loose on Spezia a rain of bombs which 
caused many deaths and did enormous damage. 

Even the casual traveller in Italy to-day 
cannot fail to be struck by the prosperity which 
the war has brought to the great manufacturing 
cities of the north as contrasted with the com- 
mercial stagnation which prevails in the south- 
ern provinces of the kingdom. In the muni- 
tion plants, most of which are in the north, are 
employed upward of half a million workers, 
of whom 75,000 are women. Genoa, Milan, 
and Turin are a-boom with industry. The 
great automobile factories have expanded amaz- 
ingly in order to meet the demand for shells, 
field-guns, and motor-trucks. Turin, as an 
officer smilingly remarked, "now consists of the 
Fiat factory and a few houses." The United 
States is not the only country to produce that 
strange breed known as munitions millionaires. 
Italy has them also — and the jewellers and 
champagne agents are doing a bigger business 
than they have ever done before. 

As the train tears southward into Tuscany 
you begin to catch fleeting glimpses of the men 
who are making possible this sudden pros- 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 9 

perity — the men who are using the motor- 
trucks and the shells and the field-guns. They 
don't look very prosperous or very happy. 
Sometimes you see them drawn up on the plat- 
forms of wayside stations, shivering beneath 
their scanty capes in the chill of an Italian dawn. 
Usually there is a background of wet-eyed 
women, with shawls drawn over their heads, 
and nearly always with babies in their arms. 
And on nearly every siding were standing long 
trains of box-cars, bedded with straw and filled 
with these same wiry, brown-faced little men 
in their rat-gray uniforms, being hurried to the 
fighting in the north. It reminded me of those 
long cattle-trains one sees in the Middle West, 
bound for the Chicago slaughter-houses. 

Rome in war-time is about as cheerful as 
Coney Island in midwinter. Empty are the 
enticing little shops on the Piazza di Spagna. 
Gone from the marble steps are the artists' 
models and the flower-girls. To visit the gal- 
leries of the Vatican is to stroll through an 
echoing marble tomb. The guards and cus- 
todians no longer welcome you for the sake of 
your tips, but for the sake of your company. 
The King, who is with the army, visits Rome 



io ITALY AT WAR 

only rarely; the Queen occupies a modest villa 
in the country; the Palace of the Quirinal has 
been turned into a hospital. The great ball- 
room, the state dining-room, the throne-room, 
even the Queen's sun-parlor, are now filled 
with white cots, hundreds and hundreds of 
them, each with its bandaged occupant, while 
in the famous gardens where Popes and Em- 
perors and Kings have strolled, convalescent 
soldiers now laze in the sun or on the gravelled 
paths play at bowls. In giving up their home 
for the use of the wounded, the King and 
Queen have done a very generous and noble 
thing, and the Italian people are not going to 
forget it. 

If Rome, which is the seat of government, 
shows such unmistakable signs of depression, 
imagine the stagnation of Florence, which has 
long been as dependent upon its crop of tour- 
ists as a Dakota farmer is upon his crop of 
wheat. The Cascine Gardens, in the old days 
one of the gayest promenades in Europe, are as 
lonely as a cemetery. At those hotels on the 
Lung' Arno, which remain open, the visitor 
can make his own terms. The Via Tornabuoni 
is as quiet as a street in a country town. The 



THE WAY TO THE WAR u 

dealers in antiques, in souvenirs, in pictures, in 
marbles, have most of them put up their shut- 
ters and disappeared, to return, no doubt, in 
happier times. 

There is in the Via Tornabuoni, midway be- 
tween Giacosa's and the American Consulate, 
an excellent barber shop. The owner, who 
learned his trade in the United States, is the 
most skilful man with scissors and razor that 
I know. His customers came from half the 
countries of the globe. 

"But they are all gone now," he told me 
sadly. "Some are righting, some have been 
killed, the others have gone back to their 
homes until the war is over. Three years ago 
I had as nice a little business as a man could 
ask for. To-day I do not make enough to 
pay my rent. But it doesn't make much 
difference, for next month my class is called 
to the colors, and in the spring my son, who 
will then be eighteen, will also have to go." 

No, they're not very enthusiastic over the 
war in Florence. But you can't blame them, 
can you ? 

In none of the great cities known and loved 



12 ITALY AT WAR 

by Americans has the war wrought such start- 
ling changes as in Venice. Because it is a 
naval base of the first importance, because it 
is almost] within sight of the Austrian coast, 
and therefore within easy striking distance of 
Trieste, Fiume, and Pola, and because through- 
out Venetia Austrian spies abound, Venice is a 
closed city. It reminded me of a beautiful 
playhouse which had been closed for an indef- 
inite period: the fire-curtain lowered, the linen 
covers drawn over the seats, the carpets rolled 
up, the scenery stored away, the great stage 
empty and desolate. Gone are the lights, the 
music, the merriment which made Venice one 
of the happiest and most care free of cities. 
Because of the frequent air raids — Venice has 
been attacked from the sky nearly a hundred 
times since the war began — the city is put to 
bed promptly at nightfall. To show a light 
from a door or window after dark is to invite a 
domiciliary visit from the police and, quite 
possibly, arrest on the charge of attempting to 
communicate with the enemy. The illumina- 
tion of the streets is confined to small candle- 
power lights in blue or purple bulbs, the weak- 
ened rays being visible for only a short distance. 




The Work of the Hun. 

The Chiesa degli Scalzi, in Venice, whose ceiling, by Tiepolo, was one of the 
master's greatest works, has suffered irreparable injury from a bomb dropped by 
an Austrian airman. 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 13 

To stroll at night in the darkened streets is 
to risk falling into a canal, while the use of an 
electric torch would almost certainly result 
in arrest as a spy. The ghastly effect pro- 
duced by the purple lights, the utter black- 
ness of the canals, the deathly silence, broken 
only by the sound of water lapping the walls 
of the empty palazzos, combine to give the 
city a peculiarly weird and sepulchral appear- 
ance. 

Of the great hotels which line the Canale 
Grande, only the Danieli remains open. Over 
the others fly the Red Cross flags, and in their 
windows and on their terraces lounge wounded 
soldiers. The smoking-room of the Danieli, 
where so many generations of travelling Ameri- 
cans have chatted over their coffee and cigars, 
has been converted into a rifugio, in which the 
guests can find shelter in case of an air attack. 
A bomb-proof ceiling has been made of two 
layers of steel rails, laid crosswise, and ram- 
parts of sand-bags have been built against the 
walls. On the doors of the bedrooms are 
posted notices urging the guests, when hostile 
aircraft are reported, to make directly for the 
rifugio, and remain there until the raid is over. 



i 4 ITALY AT WAR 

In other cities in the war zone the inhabitants 
take to their cellars during aerial attacks, but 
in Venice there are no cellars, and the buildings 
are, for the most part, too old and poorly built 
to afford safety from bombs. To provide 
adequate protection for the population, par- 
ticularly in the poorer and more congested dis- 
tricts of the city, has, therefore, proved a seri- 
ous problem for the authorities. Owing to its 
situation, Venice is extremely vulnerable to air 
attacks, for the Austrian seaplanes, operating 
from Trieste or Pola, can glide across the 
Adriatic under cover of darkness, and are over 
the city before their presence is discovered. 
Before the anti-aircraft guns can get their 
range, or the Italian airmen can rise and en- 
gage them, they have dropped their bombs 
and fled. Although, generally speaking, the 
loss of life resulting from these aerial forays is 
surprisingly small, they are occasionally very 
serious affairs. During an air raid on Padua, 
which occurred a few days before I was there, 
a bomb exploded in the midst of a crowd of 
terrified townspeople who were struggling to 
gain entrance to a rifugio. In that affair 153 
men, women, and children lost their lives. 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 15 

The admiral in command of Venice showed 
me a map of the city, which, with the excep- 
tion of a large rectangle, was thickly sprinkled 
with small red dots. There must have been 
several hundred of them. 

"These dots," he explained, "indicate where 
Austrian bombs have fallen." 

"This part of the city seems to have been 
peculiarly fortunate," I remarked, placing my 
finger on the white square. 

"That," said he, "is the Arsenal. For obvi- 
ous reasons we do not reveal whether any 
bombs have fallen there." 

Considering the frequency with which Venice 
has been attacked from the air, its churches, 
of which there are an extraordinary number, 
have escaped with comparatively little damage. 
Only four, in fact, have suffered seriously. Of 
these, the church of Santa Maria Formosa has 
sustained the greatest damage, its magnificent 
interior, with the celebrated decorations by 
Palma Vecchio, having been transformed, 
through the agency of an Austrian bomb, into 
a heap of stone and plaster. Another bomb 
chose as its target the great dome of the church 
of San Pietro di Castello, which stands on the 



i6 ITALY AT WAR 

island of San Pietro, opposite the Arsenal. 
On the Grand Canal, close by the railway- 
station, is the Chiesa degli Scalzi, whose ceiling 
by Tiepolo, one of the master's greatest works, 
has suffered irreparable injury. Santi Giovanni 
e Paolo, next to St. Mark's the most famous 
church in Venice, has also been shattered by 
a bomb. 

I asked the officer in command of the aerial 
defenses of Venice if he thought that the 
Austrian airmen intentionally bomb churches, 
hospitals, and monuments, as has been so often 
asserted in the Allied press. 

"It's this way," he explained. "A dozen 
aviators are ordered to bombard a certain city. 
Three or four of them are real heroes and, at 
the risk of their lives, descend low enough to 
make certain of their targets before releasing 
their bombs. The others, however, rather than 
come within range of the anti-aircraft guns, 
remain at a safe height, drop their bombs at 
random as soon as they are over the city, and 
then clear out. Is it very surprising, then, 
that bombs dropped from a height of perhaps 
ten thousand feet, by aircraft travelling sixty 
miles an hour, miss the forts and barracks for 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 17 

which they are intended and hit churches and 
dwellings instead?" 

Intentional or not, the bombardment of the 
Venetian churches is a blunder for which the 
Austrians will pay dearly in loss of international 
good-will. A century hence these shattered 
churches will be pointed out to visitors as the 
work of the modern Vandals, and lovers of art 
and beauty throughout the world will execrate 
the nation which permitted the sacrilege. 
The}' - have destroyed glass and paintings and 
sculptures that were a joy to the whole world, 
they have undone the work of saints and heroes 
and masters, and they have gained no corre- 
sponding military advantage. In every city 
which has been subjected to air raids the in- 
habitants have been made more obstinate, 
more iron-hard in their determination to keep 
on fighting. The sight of shattered churches, 
of wrecked dwellings, of mangled women and 
dead babies, does not terrify or dismay a 
people: it infuriates them. In the words of 
Talleyrand: "It is worse than a crime; it is a 
mistake." 

The strangest sight in Venice to-day is St. 
Mark's. There is nothing in its present ap- 



18 ITALY AT WAR 

pearance, inside or out, to suggest the famous 
cathedral which so many millions of people 
have reverenced and loved. Indeed, there is 
little about it to suggest a church at all. It 
looks like a huge and ugly warehouse, like a 
car barn, like a Billy Sunday tabernacle, for, 
in order to protect the wonderful mosaics and 
marbles which adorn the church's western 
facade, it has been sheathed, from ground to 
roof, with unpainted planks, and these, in turn, 
have been covered with great squares of as- 
bestos. By this use of fire-proof material it is 
hoped that, even should the church be hit by 
a bomb, there may be averted a lire such as 
did irreparable damage to the Cathedral of 
Rheims. 

The famous bronze horses have been removed 
from their place over the main portal of St. 
Mark's, and taken, I believe, to Florence. It 
is not the first travelling that they have done, 
for from the triumphal arch of Nero they once 
looked down on ancient Rome. Constantine 
sent them to adorn the imperial hippodrome 
which he built in Constantinople, whence the 
Doge Dandolo brought them as spoils of war 
to Venice when the thirteenth century was 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 19 

still young. In 1797 Napoleon carried them 
to Paris, but after the downfall of the Emperor 
they were brought back to Venice by the Aus- 
trians and restored to their ancient position. 
There they remained for just a hundred years, 
until the menace of the Austrian aircraft neces- 
sitated their hasty removal to a place of safety. 
Of them one of Napoleon's generals is said to 
have remarked disparagingly: "They are too 
coarse in the limbs for cavalry use, and too 
light for the guns." In any event, they were 
the only four horses, alive or dead, in the whole 
city, and the Venetians love them as though 
they were their children. 

If in its war dress the exterior of St. Mark's 
presents a strange appearance, the transforma- 
tion of the interior is positively startling. 
Nothing that ingenuity can suggest has been 
left undone to protect the sculptures, mosaics, 
glass, and marbles which, brought by the sea- 
faring Venetians from the four corners of the 
globe, make St. Mark's the most beautiful of 
churches. Everything portable has been re- 
moved to a place of safety, but the famous 
mosaics, the ancient windows, and the splendid 
carvings it is impossible to remove, and they 



20 ITALY AT WAR 

are the most precious of all. The two pulpits 
of colored marbles and the celebrated screen 
with its carven figures are now hidden beneath 
pyramids of sand-bags. The spiral columns of 
translucent alabaster which support the altar, 
are padded with excelsior and wrapped with 
canvas. Swinging curtains of quilted burlap 
protect the walls of the chapels and transepts 
from flying shell fragments. Yet all these pre- 
cautions would probably avail but little were a 
bomb to strike St. Mark's. In the destruction 
that would almost certainly result there would 
perish mosaics and sculptures which were in 
their present places when Vienna was still a 
Swabian village, and Berlin had yet to be 
founded on the plain above the Spree. 

If it has proved difficult to protect from 
airplane fire the massive basilica of St. Mark's, 
consider the problem presented to the authori- 
ties by the Palace of the Doges, that creation 
of fairylike loveliness, whose exquisite facades, 
with their delicate window tracery and fragile 
carvings, would be irretrievably ruined by a 
well-aimed bomb. In order to avert such a 
disaster, it was proposed to protect the facades 
of the palace by enclosing the building in tern- 




eg 

o — 
o 

6C= 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 21 

porary walls of masonry. It was found, how- 
ever, that this plan was not feasible, as the en- 
gineers reported that the piles on which the 
ancient building is poised would submerge if 
subjected to such an additional weight. All 
that they have been able to do, therefore, is to 
shore up the arches of the loggia with beams, 
fill up the windows with brick and plaster, and 
pray to the patron saint of Venice to save the 
city's most exquisite structure. 

The gilded figure of an angel, which for so 
many centuries has looked down on Venice 
from the summit of the Campanile, has been 
given a dress of battleship gray that it may 
not serve as a landmark for the Austrian avi- 
ators. Over the celebrated equestrian statue 
of Colleoni — of which Ruskin said: "I do not 
believe there is a more glorious work of sculp- 
ture existing in the world" — has been erected 
a titanic armored sentry-box, which is covered, 
in turn, with layer upon layer of sand-bags. 
Could the spirit of that great soldier of for- 
tune be consulted, however, I rather fancy that 
he would insist upon sitting his bronze war-, 
horse, unprotected and unafraid, facing the 
bombs of the Austrian airmen just as he used 



22 ITALY AT WAR 

to face the bolts of the Austrian crossbow- 
men. 

The commercial life of Venice is virtually at 
a standstill. Most of the glass and lace manu- 
factories have been forced to shut down. The 
dealers in curios and antiques lounge idly in 
their doorways, deeming themselves fortunate 
if they make a sale a month. All save one or 
two of the great hotels which have not been 
taken over by the Government for hospitals 
have had to close their doors. The hordes of 
guides and boatmen and waiters who depended 
for their living upon the tourists are — such of 
them as have not been called to the colors — 
without work and in desperate need. In 
normal times a quarter of Venice's 1 50,000 in- 
habitants are paupers, and this percentage 
must have enormously increased, for, notwith- 
standing the relief measures which the Govern- 
ment has taken, unemployment is general, the 
prices of food are constantly increasing, and 
coal has become almost impossible to obtain. 
Fishing, which was one of the city's chief in- 
dustries, is now an exceedingly hazardous em- 
ployment because of submarines and floating 
mines. Save for the clumsy craft of commerce, 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 23 

the gondolas have largely disappeared, and with 
them has disappeared, only temporarily, let 
us hope, the most picturesque feature of Vene- 
tian life. They have been driven off by the 
slim, polished, cigar-shaped power-boats, which 
tear madly up and down and crossways of the 
canals in the service of the military government 
and of the fleet. To use a gondola, particularly 
at night, is as dangerous as it would be to drive 
upon a motor race-course with a horse and 
buggy, for, as no lights are permitted, one is in 
constant peril of being run down by the reck- 
lessly driven power craft, whose wash, by the 
way, is seriously affecting the foundations of 
many of the palazzos. 

It is an unfamiliar, gloomy, mysterious place, 
is war-time Venice, but in certain respects I 
liked it better than the commercialized city of 
antebellum days. Gone are the droves of 
loud-voiced tourists, gone the impudent boat- 
men, the importunate beggars, the impertinent 
guides, gone the glare of lights and the blare of 
cheap music. No longer do the lantern-strung 
barges of the musicians gather nightly off the 
Molo. No longer across the waters float the 
strains of "Addio di Napoli" and " Ciri-Biri- 



24 ITALY AT WAR 

Bi"; the Canale Grande is dark and silent 
now. The tourist hostelries, on whose terraces 
at night gleamed the white shirt-fronts of 
men and the white shoulders of women, now 
have as their only guests the white-bandaged 
wounded. In its darkness, its mystery, its 
silence, it is once again the Venice of the Middle 
Ages, the Venice of lovers and conspirators, of 
inquisitors and assassins, the Venice of which 
Shakespeare sang. 

But with the coming of dawn the Venice of 
the twelfth century is abruptly transformed 
into the Venice of the twentieth. The sun, 
rising out of the Adriatic, turns into ellipsoids 
of silver the aluminum-colored observation 
balloons which form the city's first line of aerial 
defense. As the sun climbs higher it brings 
into bold relief the lean barrels of the anti- 
aircraft guns, which, from the roofs of the 
buildings to the seaward, sweep the eastern 
sky. Abreast the Public Gardens the great 
war-ships, in their coats of elephant-gray, swing 
lazily at their moorings. Near the Punta della 
Motta lie the destroyers, like greyhounds held 
in leash. Off the Riva Schiavoni, on the very 
spot, no doubt, where Dandolo's war-galleys 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 25 

lay, are anchored the British submarines. 
And atop his granite column, a link with the 
city's glorious and warlike past, still stands the 
winged lion of St. Mark, snarling a perpetual 
challenge at his ancient enemy — Austria. 

The Comando Supremo, or Great Head- 
quarters, of the Italian army is at Udine, an 
ancient Venetian town some twenty miles from 
the Austrian frontier. This is supposed to be 
a great secret, and must not be mentioned in 
letters or newspaper despatches, it being as- 
sumed that, were the Austrians to learn of the 
presence in Udine of the Comando Supremo, 
their airmen would pay inconvenient visits to 
the town, and from the clouds would drop their 
steel calling-cards on the King and General 
Cadorna. So, though every one in Italy is per- 
fectly aware that the head of the Government 
and the head of the army are at Udine, the fact 
is never mentioned in print. To believe that 
the Austrians are ignorant of the whereabouts 
of the Italian high command is to severely strain 
one's credulity. The Italians not only know 
where the Austrian headquarters is situated, but 
they know in which houses the various generals 



26 ITALY AT WAR 

live, and the restaurants in which they eat. 
This extreme reticence of the Italians seems a 
little irksome and overdone after the frankness 
one encounters on the French and British 
fronts, but it is due, no doubt, to the admoni- 
tions which are posted in hotels, restaurants, 
stations, and railway carriages throughout 
Italy: "It is the patriotic duty of good citizens 
not to question the military about the war," 
and: "The military are warned not to discuss 
the war with civilians. An indiscreet friend 
can be as dangerous as an enemy." 

My previous acquaintance with Udine had 
been confined to fleeting glimpses of it from the 
windows of the Vienna-Cannes express. Before 
the war it was, like the other towns which dot 
the Venetian plain, a quaint, sleepy, easy- 
going place, dwelling in the memories of its 
past, but with the declaration of hostilities it 
suddenly became one of the busiest and most 
important places in all Italy. From his desk 
in the Prefecture, General Cadorna, a short, 
wiry, quick-moving man in the middle sixties, 
with a face as hard and brown as a hickory- 
nut, directs the operations of the armies along 
that four-hundred-and-fifty-mile-long battle- 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 27 

line which stretches from the Stelvio to the 
sea. The cobble-paved streets and the vaulted 
arcades are gay with many uniforms, for, 
in addition to the hundreds of staff and di- 
visional officers quartered in Udine, the French, 
British, Russian, and Belgian Governments 
maintain there military missions, whose busi- 
ness it is to keep the staffs of their respec- 
tive armies constantly in touch with the Italian 
high command, thus securing practical co- 
operation. In a modest villa, a short distance 
outside the town, dwells the King, who has 
been on the front almost constantly since the 
war began. Although, as ruler of the kingdom, 
he is commander-in-chief of the Italian armies, 
he rarely gives advice unless it is asked for, 
and never interferes with the decisions of the 
Comando Supremo. Scarcely a day passes that 
he does not visit some sector of the battle- 
line. Officers and men in some of the lonely 
mountain commands told me that the only 
general who has visited them is the King. 
Should he venture into exposed positions, as 
he frequently does, he is halted by the local 
command. It is, of course, tactfully done. 
"I am responsible for your Majesty's safety," 



28 ITALY AT WAR 

says the officer. "Were there to be an accident 
I should be blamed." Whereupon the King 
promptly withdraws. If he is not permitted 
to take unnecessary risks himself, neither will 
he permit others. When the Prince of Wales 
visited the Italian front last summer, he asked 
permission to enter a certain first-line trench, 
which was being heavily shelled. The King 
bluntly refused. "I want no historic incidents 
here," he remarked dryly. 

To obtain a room in Udine is as difficult as 
it is to obtain hotel accommodation in New 
York during the Automobile Show. But, be- 
cause I was a guest of the Government, I found 
that a room had been reserved for me by the 
Comando Supremo at the Hotel Croce di Malta. 
I was told that since the war three proprietors 
of this hotel had made their fortunes and re- 
tired, and after I received my bill I believed it. 
There was in my room one of those inhospitable, 
box-shaped porcelain stoves so common in 
North Italy and the Tyrol. To keep a modest 
wood-fire going in that stove cost me exactly 
thirty lire (about six dollars) a day. But a fire 
was a necessity. Luxuries came higher. Yet 
the scene in the hotel's shabby restaurant at 



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, The King of Italy and General Cadorna at Castelnuovo. 

Scarcely a day passes that the King does not visit some sector of the battle- 
line, but he rarely gives advice unless it is asked for, and never interferes with 
the decisions of the Comando Supremo. 



THE WAY TO THE WAR 29 

the dinner-hour was well worth the fantastic 
charges, for there gathered there nightly as in- 
teresting a company as I have not often seen 
under one roof: a poet and novelist who has 
given to Italy the most important literary 
work since the days of the great classics, and 
who, by his fiery and impassioned speeches, 
did more than any single person to force the 
nation's entrance into the war; an American 
dental surgeon who abandoned an enormously 
lucrative practice in Rome to establish at the 
front a hospital where he has performed feats 
approaching the magical in rebuilding shrapnel- 
shattered faces; a Florentine connoisseur, 
probably the greatest living authority on Italian 
art, who has been commissioned with the pres- 
ervation of all the works of art in the war 
zone; an English countess who is in charge 
of an X-ray car which operates within range of 
the Austrian guns; a young Roman noble 
whom I had last seen, in pink, in the hunting- 
field; a group of khaki-clad officers from the 
British mission, cold and aloof of manner 
despite their being among allies; a party of 
Russians, their hair clipped to the skull, 
their green tunics sprinkled with stars and 



3 o ITALY AT WAR 

crosses; half a dozen French military attaches 
in beautifully cut uniforms of horizon-blue; 
and Italian officers, animated and gesticula- 
tive, on whose breasts were medal ribbons 
showing that they had fought in forgotten 
wars in forgotten corners of Africa. At one 
table they were discussing the probable date of 
some Roman remains which had just been 
unearthed at Aquileia; at another an argument 
was in progress over the merits of vers libre; 
one of the Russians was explaining a new sys- 
tem he had evolved for breaking the bank at 
Monte Carlo; the young English countess 
was retailing the latest jokes from the London 
music-halls, but nowhere did I hear mentioned 
the grim and bloody business which had 
brought us, of so many minds and from so 
many lands, to this shabby, smoke-filled, 
garlic-scented room in this little frontier town. 
Yet, had the door been opened, and had we 
stilled our voices, we could have heard, quite 
plainly, the sullen grumble of the cannon. 



II 

WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 

TO understand why Italy is at war you 
have only to look at the map of Cen- 
tral Europe. You can hardly fail to 
be struck by the curious resemblance which 
the outline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 
bears to a monstrous bird of prey hovering 
threateningly over Italy. The body of the 
bird is formed by Hungary; Bohemia is the 
right wing, Bosnia and Dalmatia constitute 
the left; the Tyrol represents the head, while 
the savage beak, with its open jaws, is formed 
by that portion of the Tyrol commonly known 
as the Trentino. And that savage beak, you 
will note, is buried deep in the shoulder of 
Italy, holding between its jaws, as it were, the 
Lake of Garda. To continue the simile, it will 
be seen that the talons of the bird, formed by 
the Istrian Peninsula, reach out over the Adri- 
atic in threatening proximity to Venice and the 
other Italian coast towns. It is to end the in- 

31 



32 



ITALY AT WAR 



tolerable menace of that beak and those claws 
that Italy is fighting. There you have it in a 
nutshell. 

Just as in France, since 1870, the national 
watchword has been "Alsace-Lorraine," so in 



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Italy, for upward of half a century, the popular 
cry has been "Italia Irredenta" — Italy Unre- 
deemed. It was a deep and bitter disappoint- 
ment to all Italians that, upon the formation 
in 1866 of the present kingdom, there should 
have been left under Austrian dominion two 
regions which, in population, in language, and 
in sentiment, were essentially Italian. These 




The Night Patrol. 

An Italian dirigible on scout duty over the Adriatic. 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 33 

"unredeemed" regions were generally called 
after their respective capital cities: Trent and 
Trieste. But, though the phrase Italia Irre- 
denta was originally interpreted as referring 
only to the Trentino and Trieste, it has grad- 
ually assumed, in the course of years, a broader 
significance, until now it includes all that por- 
tion of the Tyrol lying south of the Brenner, 
the Carso plateau, Trieste and its immediate 
hinterland, the entire Istrian Peninsula, the 
Hungarian port of Fiume, and the whole of 
Dalmatia and Albania. In other words, the 
Irredentists of to-day — and, since Italy entered 
the war, virtually the entire nation has sub- 
scribed to Irredentist aims and ideals — dream 
of an Italy whose northern frontier shall be 
formed by the main chain of the Alps, and whose 
rule shall be extended over the entire eastern 
shore of the Adriatic. 

In order to intelligently understand the 
Italian view-point, suppose that we imagine 
ourselves in an analogous position. For this 
purpose you must picture Canada as a highly 
organized military Power, its policies directed 
by an aggressive, predacious, and unscrupulous 
government, and with a population larger than 



34 ITALY AT WAR 

that of the United States. You will conceive 
of the State of Vermont as a Canadian province 
under military control: a wedge driven into 
the heart of manufacturing New England, and 
threatening the teeming valleys of the Con- 
necticut and the Hudson. You must imagine 
this province of Vermont as overrun by Ca- 
nadian soldiery; as crisscrossed by military 
roads and strategic railways; its hills and 
mountains abristle with forts whose guns are 
turned United Statesward. The inhabitants 
of the province, though American in descent, in 
traditions, and in ideals, are oppressed by a 
harsh and tyrannical military rule. With the 
exception of a single trunk-line, there are no 
railways crossing the frontier. Commercial 
intercourse with the United States is virtually 
forbidden. To teach American history in the 
schools of Vermont is prohibited; to display 
the American flag is a felony; to sing the "Star- 
Spangled Banner" is punishable by imprison- 
ment or a fine. For the Vermonters to com- 
municate, no matter how innocently, with their 
kinsmen in the United States, is to bring down 
upon them suspicion and possible punishment. 
By substituting Austria-Hungary for Canada, 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 35 

Italy for the United States, and the Trentino 
for Vermont, you will, perhaps, have a little 
clearer understanding of why the liberation 
of the Trentino from Austrian oppression is 
demanded by all Italians. 

A similar homely parallel will serve to ex- 
plain the Adriatic situation. You will imagine 
Seattle and the shores of Puget Sound, with 
its maze of islands, in Canadian possession. 
Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria are strongly 
fortified bases for Canadian battle-fleets and flo- 
tillas of destroyers which constantly menace the 
commercial cities along our Pacific seaboard. 
The Americans dwelling in Seattle and the 
towns of the Olympic Peninsula are under 
an even harsher rule than their brethren in 
Vermont. No American may hold a Govern- 
ment position. The Canadian authorities 
encourage and assist the immigration of thou- 
sands of Orientals in order to get the trade of 
the region out of American hands. A Cana- 
dian naval base at Honolulu threatens our 
trade routes in the Pacific and our commercial 
interests in Mexico and the Orient. In this 
analogy Seattle stands, of course, for Trieste; 
the Olympic Peninsula corresponds to the 



36 ITALY AT WAR 

Istrian Peninsula; for Vancouver and Victoria 
you will read Pola and Fiume; while Hono- 
lulu might, by a slight exercise of the imagina- 
tion, be translated into the great Austrian 
stronghold of Cattaro. Such is a reasonably 
accurate parallel to Italy's Adriatic prob- 
lem. 

For purposes of administration the Trentino, 
which the Austrians call Sud-Tirol, forms one 
province with Tyrol. For such a union there 
is no geographic, ethnologic, historic, or eco- 
nomic excuse. Of the 347,000 inhabitants of 
the Trentino, 338,000 are Italian. The half 
million inhabitants of Tyrol are, on the other 
hand, all Germans. The two regions are sepa- 
rated by a tremendous mountain wall, whose 
only gateway is the Brenner. On one side of 
that wall is Italy, with her vines, her mulberry- 
trees, her whitewashed, red-tiled cottages, her 
light-hearted, easy-going, Latin-blooded peas- 
antry; across the mountains is the solemn, aus- 
tere German scenery, with savage peaks and 
gloomy pine forests, a region inhabited by a 
stolid, slow-thinking Teutonic people. The 
Trentino and the Tyrol have about as much in 
common as Cuba and Maine. 




As Seen by an Airman. 
Austrian snow-trenches in the High Alps. 




o ° 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 37 

The possession of the Trentino by Austria is 
not alone a geographical and ethnological anom- 
aly: it is a pistol held at the head of Italy. 
Glance once more at the map, if you please, 
and you will see what I mean. The Trentino 
is, you will note, nothing but a prolongation of 
the valleys of Lombardy and Venetia. Held 
by Austria, it is like a great intrenched camp 
in the heart of northern Italy, menacing the 
valley of the Po, which is one of the kingdom's 
most vital arteries, and the link between her 
richest and most productive cities. From the 
Trentino, with its ring of forts, Austria can 
always threaten and invade her neighbor. She 
lies in the mountains, with the plains beneath 
her. She can always sweep down into the 
plains, but the Italians cannot seriously invade 
the mountains, since, even were they able to 
force the strongly defended passes, they would 
only find a maze of other mountains beyond. 
When, in the summer of 1916, the Archduke 
Frederick launched his great offensive from the 
Trentino, supported by a shattering artillery, 
he came perilously near — much nearer, indeed, 
than the world was permitted to know — to cut- 
ting the main east-and-west line of communica- 



38 ITALY AT WAR 

tions, which would have resulted in isolating 
the Italian armies operating on the Isonzo. 

The Trentino is dominated by the army. 
Its administration is as essentially military in 
character as that of Gibraltar. It is, to all 
intents and purposes, one vast camp, com- 
manded by thirty-five forts, gridironed with 
inaccessible military highways, and overrun 
with soldiery. Economic expansion has been 
systematically discouraged. The waterfalls of 
the Trentino could, it is estimated, develop 
250,000 horse-power, but the province has not 
benefited by this energy, for the regions to 
the north are already supplied, and the mili- 
tary authorities have not permitted its trans- 
mission to the manufacturing towns of Lom- 
bardy and Venetia, where it is needed. Neither 
roads nor railways have been built save for 
strategic purposes, and, as a result, the peas- 
ants have virtually no outlets for their produce. 
In fact, it has been the consistent policy of the 
Austrian Government to completely isolate the 
Trentino from Italy. In pursuance of this 
policy, all telephone and telegraph communica- 
tions and many sorely needed railway connec- 
tions with the other side of the frontier have 
been prohibited. Though the renting of their 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 39 

mountain pastures had always been the peas- 
ants' chief source of income, the military au- 
thorities issued orders, long before this war 
began, that Italian herdsmen could no longer 
drive their cattle across the border to graze, 
the prohibition being based on the ground that 
the herdsmen were really Italian army officers 
in disguise. In recent years the fear of Italian 
spies has become with the Austrian military 
authorities almost an insane obsession. Inno- 
cent tourists, engineers, and commercial trav- 
ellers were arrested by the score on the charge 
of espionage. The mere fact of being an Italian 
was in itself ground for suspicion. Compared 
with the attitude of the Austrian Government 
toward its Italian subjects in the Trentino, the 
treatment accorded by the Boers to the British 
residents of the Transvaal was considerate and 
kind. Thus there arose in the Trentino, as in 
all Austrian provinces inhabited by Italians, a 
strange, unhealthy atmosphere of suspicion, of 
secrecy, and of fear. This atmosphere became 
so pronounced in recent years that it was 
sensed even by passing tourists, who felt as 
though they were in a besieged city, surrounded 
by secret agents and spies. 

But, oppressive and tyrannical as are Aus- 



4 o ITALY AT WAR 

tria's methods in the Trentino, the final expres- 
sion of her anti-Italian policy is to be found 
in the Adriatic provinces. Here lie Austria's 
chief interests — the sea and commerce. Here, 
therefore, is to be found an even deeper fear of 
Italianism, and here still sterner methods are 
employed to stamp it out. The government of 
Trieste is, in fact, organized for that very pur- 
pose — witness the persecutions to which the 
citizens of Italian descent are subjected by the 
police, the countless political imprisonments, 
the systematic hostility to Italian schools in 
contrast to the Government's generosity toward 
German and Slovene institutions, and the State 
assistance given to Czech, Croatian,and Slovene 
banks for the purpose of taking the trade of 
the city out of Italian hands. Italians are ex- 
cluded from all municipal employments, from 
the postal service, the railways, and the State 
industries. Nor does the official persecution 
end there. The presentation of many of the 
old Italian operas is forbidden. The singing 
of Garibaldi's Hymn leads to jail. Every year 
thousands of Italian papers are confiscated. 
Until the war began hundreds of Italians 
were expelled annually by the police, to be re- 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 41 

placed (according to the official instructions 
of 1912) "by more loyal and more useful ele- 
ments." 

Though for more than five centuries Trieste 
has belonged to the House of Hapsburg, the 
city is as Italian as though it had always been 
ruled from Rome. There is nothing in Trieste,, 
save only the uniforms of the military and the 
K.K. on the doors of the Government offices, 
to remind one of Austrian rule. The language, 
the customs, the architecture, the names over 
the shop-doors, the faces of the people — every- 
thing is characteristically Italian. Outside of 
Trieste the zones of nationality are clearly 
divided: to the west, on the coast, dwell the 
Italians; in the mountainous interior to the 
eastward are the Slavs. But in Istria, that 
arrowhead-shaped peninsula at the head of the 
Adriatic, the population is almost solidly Italian. 
Though alternately bribed and bullied, cajoled 
and coerced, there persists, both among the 
simple peasants of the Trentino and Istria and 
the hard-headed business men of Trieste, a 
most sentimental and inextinguishable attach- 
ment for the Italian motherland. There is, 
indeed, something approaching the sublime in 



42 ITALY AT WAR 

the fascination which Italy exercises across the 
centuries on these exiled sons of hers. 

The arguments adduced by Italy for the 
acquisition of Dalmatia are by no means as 
sound ethnographically as her claims to the 
Trentino and Trieste. Though the apostles 
of expansion assert that ten per cent of the 
population of Dalmatia is Italian, this is an 
exaggeration, the most reliable authorities 
agreeing that the Italian element does not ex- 
ceed three or four per cent. But this is not 
saying that Dalmatia is not, in spirit, in 
language, in traditions, Italian. Cruise along 
its shores, talk to its people, view the architec- 
ture of Ragusa, of Zara, of Spalato, and you 
will not need to be reminded that Dalmatia 
was Venetian until, little more than a century 
ago, Napoleon handed it over to Austria at 
the peace of Campo Formio in return for the 
recognition of his two made-to-order states, 
the Cis-Alpine and Ligurian Republics. 

It is safe to say that the war will produce 
no more delicate problem than that of Dal- 
matia, which, as I have already shown, can 
never be settled on purely racial lines. Those 
who have studied the subject agree that to 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 43 

completely shut off Austria-Hungary from the 
sea would be a proceeding of grave unwisdom 
and one which would be certain to sow the 
seed for future wars. This is, I believe, the 
view taken by most deep-thinking Italians. 
The Italianization of the Adriatic's eastern 
seaboard would result, moreover, in raising a 
barrier against the legitimate expansion of 
the Balkan Slavs and would end the Serbian 
dream of an outlet to the sea. But the states- 
men who are shaping Italy's policies are, I 
am convinced, too sensible and too far-seeing 
to commit so grave a blunder. Were I to 
hazard a prophecy — and prophesying is always 
a poor business — I should say that, no matter 
how conclusive a victory the Allies may 
achieve, neither Austria-Hungary nor Serbia 
will be wholly cut off from the salt water. 

Events in the less remote theatres of war 
have prevented the Italian occupation of Al- 
bania from attracting the attention it deserves. 
The operations in that region have, moreover, 
been shrouded in mystery; foreigners desiring 
to visit Albania have met with polite but firm 
refusals; the published reports of the progress 
of the Albanian expedition — which, by the 



44 ITALY AT WAR 

way, is a much larger force than is generally 
supposed — have been meagre and unsatisfy- 
ing. The Italians figure, I fancy, on making 
their occupation as extensive and as solid as 
possible before the Albanian question comes 
up for international discussion. 

If Italy's ambitions in Dalmatia bring her 
into collision with the Slavs, her plans for 
expansion in Albania are bound to arouse the 
hostility of the Greeks. The Italian troops 
at Argyocastro are occupying territory which 
Greece looks on as distinctly within her sphere 
of influence, and they menace Janina itself. 
Though Italy has intimated, I believe, that her 
occupation of Albania is not to be regarded as 
permanent, she is most certainly on the east- 
ern shore of the Adriatic to stay, for her com- 
mercial and political interests will not per- 
mit her to have a Haiti or a Mexico at her 
front door. So I rather fancy that, when the 
peacemakers deal out the cards upon the 
green-topped table, Albania will become Italian 
in name, if not in fact, under a control similar 
to that which the French exercise in Morocco 
or the British in Egypt. And it will be quite 
natural, for there is in the Albanians a strong 
streak of Italian. 




The Carnia. 

"The Carnic Alps leap skyward in a mighty, mile-high wall. . . . You have 
the war before you, for amid these mountains snakes the Austro-Italian 
battle-line." 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 45 

The settlement of this trans-Adriatic problem 
is going to require the most cautious and 
delicate handling. How far will Italy be 
permitted to go ? How far may Serbia come ? 
Shall Austria be cut off from the sea ? Is 
Hungary to become an independent kingdom ? 
Is Montenegro to disappear ? What is Greece 
to get ? The only one of these questions that 
can be answered with any certainty is the 
last. Greece, as the result of her shifty and 
even treacherous attitude, will get very little 
consideration. On the decision of these ques- 
tions hangs the future of the Balkan peoples. 
Though their final settlement must, of course, 
be deferred until the coming of peace, some 
regard will have to be paid, after all, to actual 
occupancies and accomplished facts. That 
is why Italy is making her position in Albania 
so solid that she cannot readily be ousted. 
And perhaps it is well that she is. Europe 
will owe a debt of gratitude to the Italians if 
they can bring law and order to Albania, which 
has never had a speaking acquaintance with 
either of them. 

Nor do Italian ambitions end with the 
domination of the eastern shore of the Adri- 
atic. With the destruction, or at least the 



46 ITALY AT WAR 

disablement, of the Austrian Empire, Italy- 
dreams of bringing within her political and 
commercial sphere of influence a considerable 
portion of the Balkan Peninsula, from which 
she is separated by only forty-seven miles of 
salt water. But that is only the beginning 
of her vision of commercial greatness. Look 
at the map and you will see that with its con- 
tinuation, the island of Sicily, Italy forms a 
great wharf which reaches out into the Medi- 
terranean, nearly to the shores of Africa. Her 
peculiarly fortunate geographical position en- 
ables her, therefore, to offer the shortest route 
from Western and Central Europe to North 
Africa, the Levant, and the Farther East. It 
has been rumored, though with what truth I 
cannot say, that the Allies have agreed, in the 
event that they are completely victorious, to a 
rectification of the Tunisian and Egyptian 
frontiers, thus materially improving Italy's 
position in Libya, as the colony of Tripolitania 
is now known. It is also generally understood 
that, should the dismemberment of Asiatic 
Turkey be decided upon, the city of Smyrna, 
with its splended harbor and profitable com- 
merce, as well as a slice of the hinterland, will 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 47 

fall to Italy's portion. With her flag thus firmly 
planted on the coasts of three continents, with 
her most dangerous rival finally disposed of, 
with the splendid industrial organization, born 
of the war, speeded up to its highest efficiency, 
and with vast new markets in Africa, in Asia, 
in the Balkans opened to her products, Italy 
dreams of wresting from France and England 
the overlordship of the Middle Sea. 

It would be useless to deny that an unfa- 
vorable impression was created in the United 
States by the fact that Italy, in entering the 
war, turned against her former allies. Her 
enemies have charged that she dickered with 
both the Entente and the Central Powers, 
and only joined the former because they made 
her the most tempting offer. That she did 
dicker with Austria is but the unvarnished 
truth — and of that chapter of Italian history 
the less said the better — but I am convinced 
that she finally entered the war, not because she 
had been bribed by promises of territorial con- 
cessions, but because the national conscience 
demanded that she join the forces of civiliza- 
tion in their struggle against barbarism. Sup- 
pose that I sketch for you, in brief, bold out- 



48 ITALY AT WAR 

line, the chain of historic events which occurred 
during the ten months between the presentation 
to Serbia of the Austrian ultimatum and Italy's 
declaration of war on Austria. Then you will 
be able to form your own opinion. 

On the evening of July 23, 1914, Austria 
handed her note to Serbia. It demanded in 
overbearing and insulting terms that Serbia 
should place under Austrian control her schools, 
her law-courts, her police, in fact her whole 
internal administration. The little kingdom 
was given forty-eight hours in which to con- 
sider her answer. In other words, she was 
called upon, within the space of two days, to 
sacrifice her national independence. At six 
o'clock on the evening of July 25 the time 
limit allowed by the Austrian ultimatum ex- 
pired. Half an hour later the Austrian Minister 
and his staff left Belgrade. 

Now Article VII of the Treaty of Alliance 
between Italy, Austria, and Germany provided 
that in the event of any change in the status 
quo of the Balkan Peninsula which would entail 
a temporary or permanent occupation, Austria 
and Italy bound themselves to work in mutual 
accord on the basis of reciprocal compensation 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 49 

for any advantage, territorial or otherwise, 
obtained by either of the contracting Powers. 
Here is the text of the Article. Read it for 
yourself: 

Austria-Hungary and Italy, who aim exclusively 
at the maintenance of the status quo in the East, 
bind themselves to employ their influence to pre- 
vent every territorial change which may be detri- 
mental to one or other of the contracting Powers. 
They will give each other all explanations necessary 
for the elucidation of their respective intentions as 
well as those of the other Powers. If, however, in 
the course of events the maintenance of the status 
quo in the Balkans and on the Ottoman coasts and 
in the islands of the Adriatic and the iEgean Seas 
should become impossible, and if, either in conse- 
quence of the acts of a third Power or of other 
causes, Austria and Italy should be compelled to 
change the status quo by a temporary or permanent 
occupation, such occupation shall only take place 
after previous agreement between the two Powers, 
based on the principle of a reciprocal arrangement 
for all the advantages, territorial or other, which 
one of them may secure outside the status quo, and 
in such a manner as to satisfy all the legitimate 
claims of both parties. 

Nothing could be plainer than that Austria- 
Hungary, by forcing war upon Serbia, planned 



5 o ITALY AT WAR 

to change the status quo in the Near East. 
Yet she had not taken the trouble to give 
Italy any explanation of her intentions, nor had 
she said anything about giving her ally re- 
ciprocal compensation as provided for in the 
treaty. Three days after the memorable 23d 
of July, therefore, Italy intimated to the Vienna 
Government that her idea of adequate com- 
pensation would be the cession of those Aus- 
trian provinces inhabited by Italians. In 
other words, she insisted that, if Austria was 
to extend her borders below the Danube by 
an occupation of Serbia, as was obviously her 
intention, thus upsetting the balance of power 
in the Balkans, Italy expected to receive as 
compensation the Trentino and Trieste, which, 
though under Austrian rule, are Italian in 
sentiment and population. Otherwise, she 
added, the Triple Alliance would be broken. 
On the 3d of August, having received no satis- 
factory reply from Austria, Italy declared her 
neutrality. In so doing, however, she made it 
quite clear that she in no way admitted Aus- 
tria's right to a free hand in the Adriatic or the 
Balkan Peninsula — regions which Italy has long 
regarded as within her own sphere of influence. 



A Trench in the Trentino. 

On many sectors of the Italian front the trenches have had to be driven through 
the solid rock with pneumatic drills and dynamite. 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 51 

Early in the winter of 1914 Prince von 
Biilow, one of the most suave and experienced 
German diplomats, arrived in Rome on a 
special mission from Berlin. In his first inter- 
view with the Italian Minister of Foreign 
Affairs, Baron Sonnino, he frankly acknowl- 
edged Italy's right to territorial compensation 
under the terms of Article VII of the Triple 
Alliance. There is no doubt that Germany, 
recognizing the danger of flouting Italy, brought 
strong pressure to bear on Austria to surrender 
at least a portion of the regions in question. 
Austria, however, bluntly refused to heed 
either Italy's demands or Germany's sugges- 
tions. She refused even to discuss the question 
of ceding any part of her Italian provinces. She 
attempted, indeed, to reverse the situation , by 
claiming compensation from Italy for the occu- 
pation of the Dodecannesus and Vallona. The 
Dodecannesus was held as a pledge of Turkish 
good faith, while the occupation of Vallona was 
indispensable for the protection of Italian in- 
terests in Albania, where anarchy reigned, and 
where much the same conditions prevailed which 
existed in Mexico at the time of the American 
occupation of Vera Cruz. 



52 ITALY AT WAR 

The discussions might well have dragged on 
indefinitely, but late in March, 191 5, Austria, 
goaded by her ally into a more conciliatory at- 
titude, reluctantly consented to make con- 
crete proposals. She offered to Italy the 
southern half of the Trentino, but mentioned 
no definite boundaries, and added that the 
bargain could not be carried into effect until 
peace had been concluded. In return she 
claimed from Italy heavy financial contribu- 
tions to the National Debt and to the pro- 
vincial and communal loans, also full indem- 
nity for all investments made in the ceded 
territory, for all ecclesiastical property and en- 
tailed estates, and for the pensions of State 
officials. To assign even an approximate value 
to such concessions would entail a prolonged 
delay — a fact of which Austria was perfectly 
aware. 

Italy responded to the Austrian advances by 
presenting her counter-claims, and for more 
than a month the negotiations pursued a diffi- 
cult and tedious course. It must be admitted 
that, everything considered, Italy's claims were 
not particularly exorbitant. She claimed (1) a 
more extended and more easily defend able 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 53 

frontier in the Trentino, but she refrained from 
demanding the cession of the entire region 
lying south of the Brenner, as she would have 
been justified in doing from a strategic point 
of view; (2) a new boundary on the Isonzo 
which would give her possession of the towns 
of Gradisca and Gorizia (she has since taken 
them by arms) ; (3) the cession of certain islands 
of the Curzolari group; (4) the withdrawal of 
Austrian pretensions in Albania and the ac- 
knowledgment of Italy's right to occupy the 
Dodecannesus and Vallona; (5) the formation 
of the city of Trieste, together with the adjacent 
judicial districts of Priano and Capo dTstria, 
into an autonomous State, independent of both 
Italy and Austria. By such an arrangement 
Austria would have retained nearly the whole 
of the Istrian Peninsula, the cities of Pola and 
Fiume, the entire Dalmatian coast, and the 
majority of the Dalmatian Islands. But she 
refused to even consider Italy's proposed 
changes in the Adriatic, or to do more than 
slightly increase her offer in the Trentino. 
Italy therefore broke ofF negotiations, and on 
May 4, 191 5, the alliance with Austria was 
denounced. 



54 ITALY AT WAR 

Prince von Biilow was now confronted with 
the complete failure of his mission of keeping 
Italy yoked to Austria and Germany. No one 
realized better than this suave and astute di- 
plomatist that the bonds which still held to- 
gether the three nations were about to break. 
He next endeavored, by methods verging on 
the unscrupulous, to create distrust of the 
Italian Government among the Italian people. 
A member of the Reichstag circulated stealthily 
among the deputies and journalists, flattering 
each in turn with the assumption that he alone 
was the man of the moment, and ofFering him, 
in the names of Germany and Austria, new 
concessions which had not been communicated 
to the Italian Cabinet. It was back-stairs di- 
plomacy in its shadiest and most questionable 
form. The concessions thus unofficially prom- 
ised consisted of the offer of a new frontier in 
the Trentino, and for Trieste an administrative 
but not a political autonomy. The Adriatic, 
it seems, was to remain as before. And these 
concessions were all hedged about by impossible 
restrictions, or were not to come into effect 
until after the war. Yet at one time these 
intrigues came perilously near to accomplish- 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 55 

ing their purpose. Matters were still further 
complicated by the activities and interference 
of a former Foreign Minister, Signor Giolitti, 
whose vanity had been flattered, and whose 
ambitions had been cleverly played upon by 
the Teutonic emissary. To fully understand 
the extraordinary nature of this proceeding, 
one must picture Count von Bernstorff, at the 
height of the submarine crisis, negotiating not 
with the Government of the United States, but 
with Mr. William Jennings Bryan ! 

But, fortunately for the national honor, the 
Italian people, having had time to reflect what 
the future of Italy would be after the war, 
whatever its outcome, were they to be cut off 
from the only peoples in Europe with which 
they had spiritual sympathy, took things into 
their own hands. The storm of anger and in- 
dignation which swept the country rocked the 
Government to its foundations. The Salandra 
cabinet, which had resigned as a protest against 
the machinations of Giolitti, was returned to 
power. Through every city, town, and hamlet, 
from Savoy to Sicily, thronged workmen, stu- 
dents, business and professional men, even 
priests and monks, waving the red-white-and- 



56 ITALY AT WAR 

green banner and shouting the national watch- 
words "Italia Irredenta," and "Avanti Savoia !" 

But there was a deeper cause underlying 
these great patriotic demonstrations than mere 
hatred of Austria. They were expressions 
of national resentment at the impotent and 
dependent role which Italy had played so long. 
D'Annunzio, in one of his famous addresses in 
May, 191 5, put this feeling into words: "We 
will no longer be a museum of antiquities, a 
kind of hostelry, a pleasure resort, under a 
sky painted over with Prussian blue, for the 
benefit of international honeymooners." 

The sentiment of the people was expressed 
by the Idea Nazionale, which on May 10 de- 
clared: 

Italy desires war: (1) In order to obtain Trent, 
Trieste, and Dalmatia. The country desires it. 
A nation which has the opportunity to free its land 
should do so as a matter of imperative necessity. . . . 

(2) . . . in order to conquer for ourselves a good 
strategic frontier in the North and East. . . . 

(3) . . . because to-day, in the Adriatic, in the 
Balkan Peninsula, the Mediterranean, and Asia, 
Italy should have all the advantages it is possible 
for her to have, and without which her political, 
economic, and moral power would diminish in pro- 



WHY ITALY WENT TO WAR 57 

portion as that of others increased. ... If we 
would be a great Power we must accept certain 
obligations : one of them is war. . . . 

The voice of the people was unmistakable: 
they wanted war. To have refused that de- 
mand would have meant the fall of the Govern- 
ment if not of the dynasty. The King did not 
want war. The responsible politicians, with 
a very few exceptions, did not want it. The 
nobility did not want it. The Church did not 
want it. The bankers and business men of the 
nation did not want it. It was the great mass 
of the Italian people, shamed and indignant at 
the position in which the nation had been 
placed by the sordid dickering with Austria, 
who swept the country into war. I was in 
Italy during those exciting days; I witnessed 
the impressive popular demonstrations in the 
larger cities; and in my mind there was left 
no shadow of a doubt that the Government had 
to choose between war and revolution. On 
the 23d of May, 191 5, Italy declared war on 
Austria. 

For ten months Italy, in the face of sneers 
and jeers, threats and reproaches, had main- 
tained her neutrality. Be it remembered, how- 



58 TTALY AT WAR 

ever, that it was from the first a neutrality 
benevolent to the Allies. Even those who 
consider themselves well informed have ap- 
parently failed to recognize how decisive a 
factor that neutrality was. Italy's action in 
promptly withdrawing her forces from the 
French border relieved France's fears of an 
Italian invasion, and left her free to use the 
half million troops which had been guarding 
her southern frontier to oppose the German 
advance on Paris. It is not overstating the 
facts to assert that, had Italy's attitude toward 
France been less frank and honest, had the Re- 
public not felt safe in stripping its southern 
border of troops, von Kluck would have broken 
through to Paris — he came perilously near to 
doing so as it was — and the whole course of the 
war would have been changed. It is to be 
hoped that, when the diplomatic history of the 
war comes to be written, the attitude of Italy 
during those critical days will receive the rec- 
ognition which it deserves. 



Ill 

FIGHTING ON THE ROOF OF 
EUROPE 

THE sun had scarcely shown itself above 
the snowy rampart of the Julian Alps 
when the hoarse throbbing of the big 
gray staff-car awoke the echoes of the narrow 
street on which fronts the Hotel Croce di Malta 
in Udine. Despite a leather coat, a fur-lined 
cap, and a great fleecy muffler which swathed 
me to the eyes, I shivered in the damp chill of 
the winter dawn. We adjusted our goggles 
and settled down into the heavy rugs, the sol- 
dier-driver threw in his clutch, the sergeant sit- 
ting beside him let out a vicious snarl from the 
horn, the little group of curious onlookers scat- 
tered hastily, and the powerful car leaped for- 
ward like a race-horse that feels the spur. 
With the horn sounding its hoarse warning, we 
thundered through the narrow, tortuous, cob- 
ble-paved streets, between rows of old, old 
houses with faded frescos on their plastered 

59 



60 ITALY AT WAR 

walls and with dim, echoing arcades. And so 
into the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele — there is no 
more charming little square in Italy — with its 
fountain and its two stone giants and the pom- 
pous statue of an incredibly ugly King astride 
a prancing horse and a monument to Peace 
set up by Napoleon to commemorate a treaty 
which was the cause of many wars. At the 
back of the piazza, like the back-drop on a 
stage, rises a towering sugar-loaf mound, thrown 
up, so they say, by Attila, that from it he might 
conveniently watch the siege and burning of 
Aquileia. Perched atop this mound, and look- 
ing for all the world like one of Maxfield Par- 
rish's painted castles, is the Castello, once the 
residence of the Venetian and Austrian govern- 
ors, and, rising above it, a white and slender 
tower. If you will take the trouble to climb 
to the summit of this tower you will find that 
the earth you left behind is now laid out at 
your feet like one of those putty maps you used 
to make in school. Below you, like a vast tes- 
sellated floor, is the Friulian plain, dotted with 
red-roofed villages, checkerboarded with fields 
of green and brown, stretching away, away to 
where, beyond the blue Isonzo, the Julian and 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 61 

Carnic Alps leap skyward in a mighty, curv- 
ing, mile-high wall. You have the war before 
you, for amid those distant mountains snakes 
the Austro-Italian battle-line. Just as Attila 
and his Hunnish warriors looked down from the 
summit of this very mound, fourteen hundred 
years ago, upon the destruction of the Italian 
plain-towns, so to-day, from the same vantage- 
point, the Italians can see their artillery me- 
thodically pounding to pieces the defenses of 
the modern Huns. A strange reversal of his- 
tory, is it not ? 

Leaving on our right the Palazzo Civico, 
built two-score years before Columbus set foot 
on the beach of San Salvador, we rolled through 
the gateway in the ancient city wall, acknowl- 
edging the salute of the steel-helmeted sentry 
just as the mail-clad knights who rode through 
that same gateway to the fighting on the plain, 
long centuries ago, doubtless acknowledged the 
salute of the steel-capped men-at-arms. Down 
the straight white road we sped, between rows 
of cropped and stunted willows, which line the 
highway on either side like soldiers with bowed 
heads. It is a storied and romantic region, this 
Venetia, whose fertile farm-lands, crisscrossed 



62 ITALY AT WAR 

with watercourses, stretch away, flat and 
brown as an oaken floor, to the snowy crescent 
of the Alps. Scenes of past wars it still bears 
upon its face, in its farmhouses clustered to- 
gether for common protection, in the stout 
walls and loopholed watch-towers of its towns, 
record of its warlike and eventful past. One 
must be prosaic indeed whose imagination re- 
mains unstirred by a journey across this his- 
toric plain, which has been invaded by Celts, 
Istrians, and Romans; Huns, Goths, and Lom- 
bards; Franks, Germans, and Austrians in turn. 
Over there, a dozen miles to the southward, lie 
the ruins of Aquileia, once one of the great 
cities of the western world, the chief outpost 
fortress of the Roman Empire, visited by King 
Herod of Judea, and the favorite residence of 
Augustus and Diocletian. These fertile low- 
lands were devastated by Alaric and his 
Visigoths and by Attila and his Huns — the 
original Huns, I mean. Down this very high- 
road tramped the legions of Tiberius on their 
way to give battle to the Illyrians and Pan- 
nonians. Here were waged the savage conflicts 
of the Guelphs, the Ghibellines, and the Scali- 
gers. Here fought the great adventurer, Bar- 




A Sky-Company of Alpini. 



'The soldiers wear coats of white to render them invisible against the expanses 
of snow." 




Eh 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 63 

tolommeo Colleoni; in the whitewashed village 
inn of Campo Formio, a far greater adven- 
turer signed a treaty whereby he gave away 
the whole of this region as he would have given 
away a gold-piece; half a century later Garibaldi 
and his ragged redshirts fought to win it back. 

For mile after mile we sped through a coun- 
tryside which bore no suggestion of the bloody 
business which had brought me. So far as 
war was concerned, I might as well have been 
motoring through New England. But, though 
an atmosphere of tranquillity and security pre- 
vailed down here amid the villages and farm- 
steads of the plain, I knew that up there among 
those snow-crowned peaks ahead of us, mus- 
ketry was crackling, cannon were belching, men 
were dying. But as we approached the front 
— though still miles and miles behind the fight- 
ing-line — the signs of war became increasingly 
apparent: base camps, remount depots, auto- 
mobile parks, aviation schools, aerodromes, 
hospitals, machine-shops, ammunition-dumps, 
railway sidings chock-a-block with freight-cars 
and railway platforms piled high with sup- 
plies of every description. Moving closer, we 
came upon endless lines of motor-trucks mov- 



64 ITALY AT WAR 

ing ammunition and supplies to the front 
and other lines of motor-trucks and ambu- 
lances moving injured machinery and injured 
men to the repair-depots and hospitals at the 
rear. We passed Sicilian mule-carts, hundreds 
upon hundreds of them, two-wheeled, painted 
bright yellow or bright red and covered with 
gay little paintings such as one sees on ice- 
cream venders' carts and hurdy-gurdies, the 
harness of the mules studded with brass and 
hung with scarlet tassels. Then long strings 
of donkeys, so heavily laden with wine-skins, 
with bales of haj^, with ammunition-boxes, that 
all that could be seen of the animals themselves 
were their swinging tails and wagging ears. 
We met convoys of Austrian prisoners, guarded 
by cavalry or territorials, on their way to the 
rear. They looked tired and dirty and de- 
pressed, but most prisoners look that. A man 
who has spent days or even weeks amid the mud 
and blood of a trench, with no opportunity to 
bathe or even to wash his hands and face, with 
none too much food, with many of his comrades 
dead or wounded, with a shell-storm shrieking 
and howling about him, and has then had to 
surrender, could hardly be expected to appear 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 65 

high-spirited and optimistic. Yet it has long 
been the custom of the Allied correspondents 
and observers to base their assertions that the 
morale of the enemy is weakening and that the 
quality of his troops is deteriorating on the 
demeanor of prisoners fresh from the firing-line. 
Ambulances passed us, travelling toward the 
hospitals at the base, and sometimes wounded 
men, limping along on foot. The heads of 
some were swathed in blood-stained bandages, 
some carried their arms in slings, others hobbled 
by with the aid of sticks, for the Italian army 
is none too well supplied with ambulances and 
those who are able to walk must do so in order 
that the places in the ambulances may be taken 
by their more seriously wounded fellows. They 
were dog-tired, dirty, caked with mud and 
blood, but they grinned at us cheerfully — for 
were they not beating the Austrians ? Indeed, 
one cannot look at Italian troops without see- 
ing that the spirit of the men is high and that 
they are confident of victory. 

Now the roads became crowded, but never 
blocked, with troops on the march: infantry of 
the line, short, sturdily built fellows wearing 
short capes of greenish gray and trench-helmets 



66 ITALY AT WAR 

of painted steel; Alpini, hardy and active as the 
goats of their own mountains, their tight-fitting 
breeches and their green felt hats with the slant- 
ing eagle's feather making them look like the 
chorus of Robin Hood; Bersaglieri, the flower 
of the Italian army, who have preserved the 
traditions of their famous corps by still cling- 
ing to the flat-brimmed, rakish hat with its 
huge bunch of drooping feathers; engineers, 
laden like donkeys with intrenching, bridging, 
and mining tools; motor-cycle despatch riders, 
leather-jacketed and mud-bespattered, the 
light-horsemen of modern war; and, very occa- 
sionally, for their hour for action has not yet 
come, detachments of cavalry, usually armed 
with lances, their helmets and busbies linen- 
covered to match the businesslike simplicity of 
their uniform. About the Italian army there 
is not much of the pomp and circumstance of 
war. It is as businesslike as a blued-steel 
revolver. In its total absence of swagger and 
display it is characteristic of a nation whose 
instincts are essentially democratic. Every- 
thing considered, the Italian troops compare 
very favorably with any in Europe. The 
men are for the most part shortish, Very thick- 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 67 

set, and burned by the sun to the color of a 
much-used saddle. I rather expected to see 
bearded, unkempt fellows, but I found them 
clean-shaven and extraordinarily neat. The 
Italian military authorities do not approve 
of the poilu. Though the men are laden 
like pack-mules, they cover the ground at a 
surprisingly smart pace, while special corps, 
such as the Bersaglieri and the Alpini, are 
famous for the fashion in which they take even 
the steepest acclivities at the double. I was 
told that, though the troops recruited in the 
North possess the most stamina and endurance, 
the Neapolitans and Sicilians have the most 
elan and make the best fighters, these sons of 
the South having again and again advanced 
to the assault through storms of fire which 
the colder-blooded Piedmontese refused to face. 
It is claimed for the Italian uniform that it 
is at once the ugliest and the least visible of 
any worn in Europe. "Its wearer doesn't even 
make a shadow," a friend of mine remarked. 
The Italian military authorities were among 
the first to make a scientific study of colors 
for uniforms. They did not select, for exam- 
ple, the "horizon blue" adopted by the French 



68 ITALY AT WAR 

because, while this is less visible on the roads 
and plains of a flat, open, sunlit region, it 
would prove fatally distinct on the tree-clad 
mountain slopes where the Italians are fight- 
ing. The color is officially described as gray- 
green, but the best description of it is that 
given by a British officer: "Take some mud 
from the Blue Nile, carefully rub into it two 
pounds of ship-rat's hair, paint a roan horse 
with the composition, and then you will under- 
stand why the Austrians can't see the Italian 
soldiers in broad daylight at fifty yards." Its 
quality of invisibility is, indeed, positively 
uncanny. While motoring in the war zone I 
have repeatedly come upon bodies of troops 
resting beside the road, yet, so marvellously do 
their uniforms merge into the landscape that, 
had not my attention been called to them, I 
should have passed them by unnoticed. The 
uniform of the Italian officer is of precisely the 
same cut and apparently of the same material 
as that of the men, and as the former not in- 
frequently dispense with the badges of rank, 
it is often difficult to distinguish an officer from 
a private. The Italian officers, particularly 
those of the cavalry regiments, have always 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 69 

been among the smartest in Europe, but the 
gorgeous uniforms which, in the happy, care- 
free days before the war, added such brilliant 
notes of color to the scenes on the Corso and 
in the Cascine, have been replaced by a dress 
which is as simple as it is serviceable 

The Italian Government has a stern objec- 
tion to wasteful or unnecessary expenditure, 
and all the costly and superfluous trimmings 
so dear to the heart of the military have been 
ruthlessly pruned. But economy is not in- 
sisted upon at the expense of efficiency. Noth- 
ing is refused or stinted that is necessary to 
keep the soldiers in good health or that will 
add to the efficiency of the great fighting- 
machine. But the war is proving a heavy 
financial strain for Italy and she is de- 
termined not to waste on it a single soldo more 
than she can possibly help. On the French 
and British fronts staff-officers are constantly 
dashing to and fro in motor-cars on errands of 
more or less importance. But you see nothing 
of that sort in the Italian war zone. The Co- 
mando Supremo can, of course, have all the 
motor-cars it wants, but it discourages their 
use except in cases of necessity. The officers 



70 ITALY AT WAR 

are instructed that, whenever they can travel 
by railway without detriment to the interests 
of the service, they are expected to do so, for 
the trains are in operation to within a few 
miles of the front and with astonishing regu- 
larity, whereas tires and gasolene cost money. 
Returning at nightfall from the front to Udine, 
we were nearly always stopped by officers — 
majors, colonels, and once by a general — who 
would ask us to give them a lift into town. It 
has long been the fashion among foreigners to 
think of Italians, particularly those of the 
upper class, as late-rising, easy-going, and not 
particularly in love with work — a sort of dolce 
jar niente people. But the war has shown how 
unsafe are such generalizations. There is no 
harder worker on any front than the Italian 
officer. Even the highest staff-officers are at 
their desks by eight and frequently by seven. 
Though it is easier to get from the Italian 
front to Milan or Florence than it is to get 
from Verdun to Paris, or from the Somme to 
London, one sees little of the week-end travel- 
ling so common on the British front. Officers 
in the war zone are entitled to fifteen days' 
leave of absence a year, and from this rule there 
are no deviations. 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 71 

Through the mud we came to the Judrio, 
which marked the line of the old frontier. We 
crossed the river by a pontoon bridge, for the 
Austrians had destroyed the other in their 
retreat. 

"We are in Austria now, I suppose ?" I re- 
marked. "In Italia Redenta," my companion 
corrected me. "This region has always been 
Italian in everything but name, and now 
it is Italian in name also." The occupation 
by the Italian troops, at the very outset of 
the war, of this wedge of territory between 
the Judrio and the Isonzo, with Monfalcone, 
Cervignano, Cormons, Gradisca — old Italian 
towns all — did much to give the Italian people 
confidence in the efficiency of their armies and 
the ability of their generals. 

Now the roads were filled with the enormous 
equipment of an army advancing. Every vil- 
lage swarmed with gray soldiers. We passed 
interminable processions of motor-lorries, mule- 
carts, trucks, and wagons piled high with 
hay,* lumber, wine-casks, flour, shells, barbed 
wire; boxes of ammunition; pontoon-trains, 

* I was told by a British general that thousands of tiny steel 
prongs had been discovered in baled hay brought from America. 
They were evidently put there by German sympathizers in the 
United States with the object of killing the Allies' horses. 



72 ITALY AT WAR 

balloon outfits, searchlights mounted on motor- 
trucks, wheeled blacksmith shops, wheeled post- 
offices, field-kitchens; beef and mutton on the 
hoof; mammoth howitzers and siege guns hauled 
by panting tractors; creaking, clanking field-bat- 
teries, and bright-eyed, brown-skinned, green- 
caped infantry, battalions, regiments, brigades 
of them plodding along under slanting lines of 
steel. All the resources of Italy seemed crowd- 
ing up to make good the recent gains and to 
make ready for the next push. One has to see 
a great army on the march to appreciate how 
stupendous is the task of supplying with food 
the hungry men and the hungrier guns, and 
how it taxes to the utmost all the industrial 
resources of a nation. 

Under all this traffic the roads remained hard 
and smooth, for gangs of men, with scrapers 
and steam-rollers were at work everywhere 
repairing the wear and tear. This work is 
done by peasants, who are too old for the 
army, middle-aged, sturdily built fellows who 
perform their prosaic task with the resigna- 
tion and inexhaustible patience of the lower- 
class Italian. They are organized in companies 
of a hundred men each, called centurias x and 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 73 

the company commanders are called (shades of 
the Roman legions!) centurions. Italy owes 
much to these gray-haired soldiers of the pick 
and shovel who, working in heat and cold, in 
snow and rain, and frequently under Austrian 
fire, have made it possible for the armies to 
advance and for food to be sent forward for 
the men and ammunition for the guns. 

When this war is over Italy will find herself 
with better roads, and more of them, than she 
ever had before. The hundreds of miles of 
splendid highways which have been built by 
the army in the Trentino, in the Carnia, and in 
Cadore will open up districts of extraordinary 
beauty which have hitherto been inaccessible to 
the touring motorist. The Italians have been 
fortunate in having an inexhaustible supply of 
road-building material close at hand, for the 
mountains are solid road metal and in the 
plains one has only to scratch the soil to find 
gravel. The work of the road-builders on the 
Upper Isonzo resembles a vast suburban de- 
velopment, for the smooth white highways 
which zigzag in long, easy gradients up the 
mountain slopes are bordered on the inside by 
stone-paved gutters and on the outside, where 



74 ITALY AT WAR 

the precipice falls sheer away, by cut stone 
guard-posts. So extensive and substantial are 
these improvements that one instinctively looks 
for a real-estate dealer's sign: "This beautiful 
lot can be yours for twenty-five dollars down 
and ten dollars a month for a year." Climb- 
ing higher, the roads become steeper and nar- 
rower and, because of the heavy rains, very 
highly crowned, with frequent right-angle and 
hair-pin turns. Here a skid or a side-slip or 
the failure of your brakes is quite likely to bring 
your career to an abrupt and unpleasant ter- 
mination. To motor along one of these military 
mountain highways when it is slippery from 
rain is as nerve-trying as walking on a shingled 
roof with smooth-soled shoes. At one point on 
the Upper Isonzo there wasn't enough room 
between our outer wheels and the edge of the 
precipice for a starved cat to pass. 

Now we were well within the danger zone. 
I knew it by the screens of woven reeds and 
grass matting which had been erected along 
one side of the road in order to protect the 
troops and transport using that road from 
being seen by the Austrian observers and 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 75 

shelled by the Austrian guns. Practically all 
of the roads on the Italian side of the front are, 
remember, under direct observation by the 
Austrians. In fact, they command everything. 
Everywhere they are above the Italians. From 
the observatories which they have established 
on every peak they can see through their 
powerful telescopes what is transpiring down on 
the plain as readily as though they were cir- 
cling above it in an airplane. As a result of the 
extraordinary advantage which the Austrians 
enjoy in this respect, it has been found neces- 
sary to screen certain of the roads not only on 
both sides but above, so that in places the 
traffic passes for miles through literal tunnels 
of matting. This road masking is a simple 
form of the art of concealment to which the 
French have given the name "camouflage " 
which has been developed to an extraordinary 
degree on the Western Front. That the Ital- 
ians have not made a greater use of it is due, 
no doubt, to the wholly different conditions 
under which they are fighting. 

Now the crowded road that we were follow- 
ing turned sharply into a narrow valley, down 
which a small river twisted and turned on its 



76 ITALY AT WAR 

way to the sea. Though the Italian positions 
ran along the top of the hill slope just above 
us, and though less than a thousand yards 
away were the Austrian trenches, that valley, 
for many miles, was literally crawling with 
men and horses and guns. Indeed it was 
difficult to make myself believe that we were 
within easy range of the enemy and that at 
any instant a shell might fall upon that teem- 
ing hillside and burst with the crash that scat- 
ters death. 

Despite the champagne-cork popping of the 
rifles and the basso profundo of the guns, it was 
a scene of ordered, yes, almost peaceful industry 
which in no way suggested war but reminded 
me, rather, of the Panama Canal at the busiest 
period of its construction (I have used the 
simile before, but I use it again because I know 
none better), of the digging of the New York 
subway, of the laying of a transcontinental 
railway, of the building of the dam at Assuan. 
Trenches which had recently been captured 
from the Austrians were being cleared and 
renovated and new trenches were being dug, 
roads were being repaired, a battery of mon- 
ster howitzers was being moved into ingeni- 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 77 

ously concealed positions, a whole system of 
narrow-gauge railway was being laid down, 
enormous quantities of stores were being un- 
loaded from wagons and lorries and neatly 
stacked, soldiers were building great water- 
tanks on stilts, like those at railway sidings, 
giant shells were being lowered from trucks 
and flat-cars by means of cranes; to the ac- 
companiment of saws and hammers a city of 
wooden huts was springing up on the reverse 
slope of the hill as though at the wave of a 
magician's wand. 

As I watched with fascinated eyes this scene 
of activity, as city idlers watch the laborers at 
work in a cellar excavation, a shell burst on 
the crowded hillside, perhaps five hundred 
yards away. There was a crash like the ex- 
plosion of a giant cannon-cracker; the ground 
leaped into flame and dust. A few minutes 
afterward I saw an ambulance go tearing up 
the road. 

"Just a chance shot," said the staff-officer 
who accompanied me. "This valley is one of 
the few places on our front which is invisible 
to the Austrian observers. That's why we 
have so many troops in here. The Austrian 



78 ITALY AT WAR 

aviators could spot what is going on here, of 
course, but our fliers and our anti-aircraft bat- 
teries have been making things so hot for them 
lately that they're not troubling us much. 
That's the great thing in this game — to keep 
control of the air. If the Austrian airmen 
were able to get over this valley and direct the 
fire of their guns we wouldn't be able to stay 
here an hour." 

My companion had thought that it might 
be possible to follow the road down the valley 
to Monfalcone and the sea, and so it would 
have been had the weather continued misty 
and rainy. But the sun came out brightly just 
as we reached the beginning of an exposed 
stretch of the road; an Austrian observer, peer- 
ing through a telescope set up in a monastery 
on top of a mountain ten miles away, caught 
sight of the hurrying gray insect which was our 
car; he rang up on the telephone a certain 
battery and spoke a few words to the battery 
commander; and an instant later on the road 
along which we were travelling Austrian shells 
began to fall. Shells being expensive, that 
little episode cost the Emperor-King several 
hundred kronen, we figured. As for us, it 




ffi 



£ ^e 



K «. 




2 3 

TO ^ nl 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 79 

merely interrupted a most interesting morn- 
ing's ride. 

Leaving the car in the shelter of a hill, we 
toiled up a steep and stony slope to a point from 
which I was able to get an admirable idea of 
the general lay of Italy's Eastern Front. Com- 
ing toward me was the Isonzo — a bright blue 
stream the width of the Thames at New Lon- 
don — which, happy at escaping from its gloomy 
mountain defile, went rioting over the plain 
in a great westward curve. Turning, I could 
catch a glimpse, through a notch in the hills, 
of the white towers and pink roofs of Monfal- 
cone against the Adriatic's changeless blue. 
To the east of Monfalcone rose the red heights 
of the Carso, the barren limestone plateau 
which stretches from the Isonzo south into 
Istria. And beyond the Carso I could trace 
the whole curve of the mountains from in front 
of Trieste up past Gorizia and away to the 
Carnia. The Italian front, I might add, divides 
itself into four sectors: the Isonzo, the Carnia 
and Cadore, the Trentino, and the Alpine. 

Directly below us, not more than a kilometre 
away, was a village which the Austrians were 
shelling. Through our glasses we could see 



8o ITALY AT WAR 

the effects of the bombardment as plainly as 
though we had been watching a football game 
from the upper tier of seats in the Yale Bowl. 
They were using a considerable number of guns 
of various calibers and the crash of the burst- 
ing shells was almost incessant. A shell struck 
a rather pretentious building, which was evi- 
dently the town hall; there was a burst of 
flame, and a torrent of bricks and beams and 
tiles shot skyward amid a geyser of green- 
brown smoke. Another projectile chose as its 
target the tall white campanile, which suddenly 
slumped into the street, a heap of brick and 
plaster. Now and again we caught glimpses 
of tiny figures — Italian soldiers, most likely — 
scuttling for shelter. Occasionally the Aus- 
trians would vary their rain of heavy projec- 
tiles with a sort of shell that went bang and re- 
leased a fleecy cloud of smoke overhead and 
then dropped a parcel of high explosive that 
burst on the ground. It was curious to think 
that the guns from which these shells came 
were cunningly hidden away in nooks and glens 
on the other side of that distant range of hills 
that the men serving the guns had little if 
any idea what they were firing at, and that the 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 81 

bombardment was being directed and con- 
trolled by an officer seated comfortably at the 
small end of a telescope up there on a moun- 
tain top among the clouds. Yet such is mod- 
ern war. It used to be one of the artillerist's 
tenets that his guns should be placed in a 
position with a "commanding" range of view. 
But nowadays guns "command" nothing. In- 
stead they are tucked away in gullies and leafy 
glens and excavated gun-pits, and their muz- 
zles, instead of frowning down on the enemy 
from an eminence, stare blindly skyward from 
behind a wall of hills or mountains. The 
Italians evidently grew tired of letting the 
Austrians have their way with the town, for 
presently some batteries of heavy guns behind 
us came into action and their shells screamed 
over our heads. Soon a brisk exchange of 
compliments between the Italian and Austrian 
guns was going on over the shattered roofs of 
the town. We did not remain overlong on 
our hillside and we were warned by the artillery 
officer who was guiding us to keep close to the 
ground and well apart, for, were the Austrians 
to see us in a group, using maps and field- 
glasses, they probably would take us for artil- 



82 ITALY AT WAR 

lery observers and would send over a violent 
protest cased in steel. 

On none of the European battle-fronts is 
there a more beautiful and impressive journey 
than that from Udine up to the Italian positions 
in the Carnia. The Carnia sector connects 
the Isonzo and Trentino fronts and forms a 
vital link in the Italian chain of defense, for, 
were the Austrians to break through, they 
would take in flank and rear the great Italian 
armies operating on the two adjacent fronts. 
West of the Carnia, in Cadore, the Italians 
are campaigning in one of the world's most 
famous playgrounds, for, in the days before 
the Great War, pleasure-seekers from every 
corner of Europe and America swarmed by 
the tens of thousands in the country round 
about Cortina and in the enchanted valleys of 
the Dolomites. But now great gray guns are 
emplaced in the shady glens where the honey- 
mooners used to stroll; on the terraces of the 
tourist hostelries, where, on summer after- 
noons, men in white flannels and women in 
dainty frocks chattered over their tea, now 
lounge Italian officers in field uniforms of gray; 
the blare of dance music and the popping of 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 83 

champagne corks has been replaced by the blare 
of bugles and the popping of rifles. 

If you have ever gone, in a single day, from 
the sunlit orange groves of Pasadena] up to 
the snow-crowned peaks of the Coast Range, 
you will have as good an idea as I can give you 
of the journey from the Isonzo up to the Car- 
nia. Down on the Carso the war is being 
waged under a sky of molten brass and in sum- 
mer the winds which sweep that arid plateau 
are like blasts from an open furnace-door. The 
soldiers fighting in the Carnia, on the other 
hand, not infrequently wear coats of white fur 
to protect them from the cold and to render 
them invisible against the expanses of snow. 
When I was on the Italian front they told me 
an incident of this mountain warfare. There 
was desperate fighting for the possession of a 
few yards of mountain trenches and a half- 
battalion of Austrian Jaegers — nearly five hun- 
dred men — were enfiladed by machine-gun fire 
and wiped out. That night there was a heavy 
snowfall and the Austrian corpses sprawled 
upon the mountainside were soon buried deep 
beneath the fleecy flakes. The long winter 
wore along, the war pursued its dreary course, 



84 ITALY AT WAR 

to five hundred Austrian homes the Austrian 
War Office sent a brief message that the hus- 
band or son or brother had been "reported 
missing." Then the spring came, the snow 
melted from the mountainsides, and the horri- 
fied Italians looked on the five hundred Aus- 
trians, frozen stiff, as meat is frozen in a re- 
frigerator, in the same attitudes in which they 
had died months before. 

With countless hair-pin, hair-raising turns, 
our road wound upward, bordered on one hand 
by the brinks of precipices, on the other by bare 
walls of rock. It was a smooth road, splendidly 
built, but steep and terrifyingly narrow — so 
narrow in places that it was nothing more than 
a shelf blasted from the sheer face of the cliff. 
Twice, meeting motor-lorries downward bound, 
we had to back along that narrow shelf, with 
our outer wheels on the brink of emptiness, 
until we came to a spot where there was room 
to pass. It was a ticklish business. 

At one point a mountain torrent leaped from 
the cliff into the depths below. But the water- 
power was not permitted to go to waste; it had 
been skilfully harnessed and was being used to 
run a completely equipped machine-shop where 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 85 

were brought for repair everything from motor- 
trucks to machine-guns. That was one of the 
things that impressed me most — the mechanical 
ability of the Italians. The railways, cable- 
ways, machine-shops, bridges, roads, reservoirs, 
concrete works that they have built, more often 
than not in the face of what would appear to 
be unsurmountable difficulties, prove them to 
be a nation of engineers. 

Up to the heights toward which we were 
climbing so comfortably and quickly in a 
motor-car there was before the war, so I was 
told, nothing but a mule-path. Now there is 
this fine military road, so ingeniously graded 
and zigzagged that two-ton motor-trucks can 
now go with ease where before a donkey had 
difficulty in finding a footing. When these 
small and handy motor-trucks come to a point 
where it is no longer possible for them to find 
traction, their loads are transferred to the re- 
markable wire-rope railways, or telefericas, as 
they are called, which have made possible this 
campaign in cloudland. Similar systems are 
in use, all over the world, for conveying goods 
up the sides of mountains and across chasms. 
A wire rope running over a drum at each side 



86 ITALY AT WAR 

of the chasm which has to be crossed forms a 
double line of overhead railway. Suspended 
on grooved wheels from this overhead wire are 
"cars" consisting of shallow iron trays about 
the length and width of coffins, one car going 
up as the other comes down. The floors of the 
cars are perforated so as to permit the draining 
off of water or blood — for men wounded in the 
mountain fighting are frequently brought down 
to the hospitals in them — and the sides are of 
latticework, and, I might add, quite unneces- 
sarily low. Nor is the prospective passenger 
reassured by being told that there have been 
several cases where soldiers, suddenly overcome 
by vertigo, have thrown themselves out while 
in mid-air. If the cars are properly loaded, and 
if there is not a high wind blowing, the telej "erica 
is about as safe as most other modes of convey- 
ance, but should the cars have been carelessly 
loaded, or should a strong wind be blowing, 
there is considerable danger of their coming 
into collision as they pass. In such an event 
there would be a very fair chance of the pas- 
senger spattering up the rocks a thousand feet 
or so below. There is still another, though a 
rather remote possibility: that of being shelled 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 87 

while in mid-air, for certain of the telef ericas 
run within view of the Austrian positions. And 
sometimes the power which winds the drum 
gives out and the car and its passengers are 
temporarily marooned in space. Aviation, 
motor-racing, mountain- climbing, big-game 
hunting, all seem commonplace and tame 
compared with the sensation of swinging help- 
lessly in a shallow bathtub over half a mile of 
emptiness while an Austrian battery endeavors 
to pot you with shrapnel, very much as a small 
boy throws stones at a scared cat clinging to 
a limb. 

Yet over these slender wires has been trans- 
ported an army, with its vast quantities of food, 
stores, and ammunition, and by the same 
method of transportation have been sent back 
the wounded. Without this ingenious device 
it is doubtful if the campaign in the High Alps 
could ever have been fought. But the cables, 
strong though they are, are yet too weak to 
bear the weight of the heavy guns, some of 
them weighing forty and fifty tons, which the 
Italians have put into action on the highest 
peaks. So, by the aid of ropes and levers and 
pulleys and hundreds of brawny backs and 



88 ITALY AT WAR 

straining arms, these monster pieces have been 
hauled up slopes as steep as that of the Great 
Pyramid, have been hoisted up walls of rock 
as sheer and high as those of the Flatiron 
Building. You question this ? Well, there 
they are, great eight and nine inch monsters, 
high above the highest of the wire roads, one 
of them that I know of at a height of ten 
thousand feet above the sea. There is no 
doubting it, incredible as it may seem, for 
they speak for themselves — as the Austrians 
have found to their cost. 

The most advanced positions in the Carnia, 
as in the Trentino, are amid the eternal snows. 
Here the guns are emplaced in ice caverns 
which can be reached only through tunnels 
cut through the drifts; here the men spend 
their days wrapped in shaggy furs, their faces 
smeared with grease as a protection from the 
stinging blasts, and their nights in holes bur- 
rowed in the snow, like the igloos of Esqui- 
maux. On no front, not on the sun-scorched 
plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the frozen Ma- 
zurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud 
of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so 
arduous an existence as up here on the roof 
of the world. I remember standing with an 



ON THE ROOF OF EUROPE 89 

Italian officer in an observatory in the lower 
mountains. The powerful telescope was 
trained on the snow-covered summit of one 
of the higher peaks. 

"Do you see that little black speck on the 
snow at the very top ?" the officer asked me. 

I told him that I did. 

"That is one of our positions," he continued. 
"It is held by a lieutenant and thirty Alpini. 
I have just received word that, as the result of 
yesterday's snow-storm, our communications 
with them have been cut off. We will not be 
able to relieve them, or get supplies to them, 
much before next April." 

And it was then only the middle of December ! 

In the Carnia and on the Upper Isonzo one 
finds the anomaly of first-line trenches which 
are perfectly safe from attack. I visited such 
a position. Through a loophole I got a little 
framed picture of the Austrian trenches not five 
hundred yards away, and above them, cut in 
the mountainside, the square black openings 
within which lurked the Austrian guns. Yet 
we were as safe from anything save artillery 
fire as though we were in Mars, for between 
the Italian trenches and the Austrian inter- 
vened a chasm half a thousand feet deep and 



9 o ITALY AT WAR 

with walls as steep and smooth as the side of a 
house. The narrow strip of valley at the bot- 
tom of the chasm was a sort of no man's land, 
where forays, skirmishes, and all manner of 
desperate adventures took place nightly be- 
tween patrols of Jaegers and Alpini. 

As with my field-glasses I was sweeping the 
turmoil of trench-scarred mountains which lay 
spread, below me, like a map in bas-relief, an 
Austrian battery quite suddenly set up a deaf- 
ening clamor, and on a hillside, miles away, I 
could see its shells bursting in clouds of smoke 
shot through with flame. They looked like 
gigantic white peonies breaking suddenly into 
bloom. The racket of the guns awoke the 
most extraordinary echoes in the mountains. 
It was difficult to believe that it was not 
thunder. Range after range caught up the 
echoes of that bombardment and passed them 
on until it seemed as though they must have 
reached Vienna. For half an hour, perhaps, 
the cannonade continued, and then, from an 
Italian position somewhere above and behind 
us, came a mighty bellow which drowned out 
all other sounds. It was the angry voice of 
Italy bidding the Austrians be still. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 

IN order to appraise the Italian operations 
on the Carso at their true value, it is 
necessary to go back to May, 1916, 
when the Archduke Frederick launched his 
great offensive from the Trentino. Now it 
must be kept constantly in mind, as I have 
tried to emphasize in preceding chapters, that 
when the war opened, the Italians had always 
to go up while the Austrians needed only to 
come down. The latter, intrenched high on 
that tremendous natural rampart formed by the 
Rhaetian and Tyrolean Alps, the Dolomites, the 
Carnic, Julian, and Dinaric ranges, had an im- 
mense superiority over their enemy on the 
plains below. The Austrian offensive in the 
Trentino was dictated by four reasons: first, 
to divert the Italians from their main objective, 
Trieste; second, to lessen the pressure which 
General Cadorna was exerting against the Aus- 
trian lines on the Isonzo; third, to smash 

91 



92 ITALY AT WAR 

through to Vicenza and Verona, thus cutting 
off and compelling the capitulation of the 
Italian armies operating in Venetia; and fourth, 
to so thoroughly discourage the Italians that 
they would consent to a separate peace. 

The story of how this ambitious plan was 
foiled is soon told. By the first week in May 
the Austrians had massed upon the Trentino 
front a force of very nearly 400,000 men with 
2,000 guns. Included in this tremendous ac- 
cumulation of artillery were 26 batteries of 
12-inch guns and several of the German 
giants, the famous 42-centimetre pieces, which 
brought down the pride of Antwerp and 
Namur. By the middle of May everything 
was ready for the onset to begin, and this 
avalanche of soldiery came rolling down the 
Asiago plateau, between the Adige and the 
Brenta. Below them, basking in the sun- 
shine, stretched the alluring plains of Venetia, 
with their wealth, their women, and their 
wine. Pounded by an immensely superior 
artillery, overwhelmed by wave upon wave 
of infantry, the Italians sullenly fell back, 
leaving the greater part of the Sette Communi 
plateau and the upper portion of the Brenta 




M £> 



Ph 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 93 

valley in the hands of the Austrians. At the 
beginning of June a cloud of despondency and 
gloom hung over Italy, and men went about 
with sober faces, for it seemed all but certain 
that the enemy would succeed in breaking 
through to Vicenza, and by cutting the main 
east-and-west line of railway, would force the 
armies operating on the Isonzo and in the 
Carnia to surrender. But the soldiers of the 
Army of the Trentino, though outnumbered 
in men and guns, determined that the Aus- 
trians should pay a staggering price for every 
yard of ground they gained. They fought as 
must have fought their ancestors of the Roman 
legions. And, thanks to their tenacity and 
pluck, they held their opponents on the five- 
yard line. Then, just in the nick of time, the 
whistle blew. The game was over. The Aus- 
trians had to hurry home. They had staked 
everything on a sudden and overwhelming on- 
slaught by which they hoped to smash the 
Italian defense and demoralize the Italian 
armies in time to permit at least half their 
eighteen divisions and nearly all of their heavy 
guns being withdrawn in a few weeks and 
rushed across Austria to the Galician front, 



94 ITALY AT WAR 

where they were desperately needed to stay 
the Russian advance. 

By the beginning of the last week in June 
the Austrian General Staff, recognizing that its 
plan for the overwhelming of northern Italy had 
failed disastrously, issued orders for a general 
retreat. The Austrians had planned to fall 
back on the positions which had been prepared 
in advance in the mountains and to establish 
themselves, with greatly reduced numbers, on 
this practically impregnable line, while the 
transfer of the divisions intended for the Car- 
pathians was effected. But General Cadorna 
had no intention of letting the Austrians escape 
so easily. In less than a week he had col- 
lected from the garrisons and training camps 
and reserve battalions an army of 500,000 men. 
It was one of the most remarkable achieve- 
ments of the war. From all parts of Italy he 
rushed those half million men to the Trentino 
front by train — and despite the immense strain 
put upon the Italian railways by the rapid 
movement of so great a body of troops, the 
regular passenger service was suspended for 
only three days. (At that same time the Ameri- 
can Government was attempting to concentrate 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 95 

a force of only 150,000 men on the Mexican 
border; a comparison of Italian and American 
efficiency is instructive.) He formed that army 
into brigades and divisions, each complete 
with staff and supply trains and ammunition 
columns. He organized fresh bases of supply, 
including water, of which there is none on the 
Asiago plateau. He provided the stupendous 
quantity of stores and ammunition and equip- 
ment and transport required by such an army. 
(It is related how Cadorna's Chief of Trans- 
port wired the Fiat Company of Turin that he 
must have 545 additional motor-trucks within 
a week, and how that great company re- 
sponded by delivering in the time specified 
546 — one over for good measure.) Almost in 
a night he transformed the rude mule-paths 
leading up onto the plateau into splendid 
military roads, wide enough and hard enough 
to bear the tremendous traffic to which they 
were suddenly subjected. And finally he 
rushed his troops up those roads in motor- 
cars and motor-trucks, afoot and on horse- 
back and astride of donkeys and flung them 
against the Austrians. So sudden and savage 
was the Italian onset that the Austrians did 



96 ITALY AT WAR 

not dare to spare a man or gun for their 
Eastern Front — and meanwhile the Muscovite 
armies were pressing on toward the Dniester. 
It is no exaggeration to assert that the success 
of Brussiloff's offensive in Galicia was due 
in no small measure to the Italian counter- 
offensive in the Trentino. That adventure cost 
Austria at least 100,000 dead and wounded 
men. 

But not for a moment did the Italians permit 
the Austrian offensive in the Trentino to dis- 
tract them from their real objectives: Gorizia, 
the Carso, and Trieste. The "military ex- 
perts," who from desks in newspaper offices 
tell the public how campaigns ought to be con- 
ducted, had announced confidently that Italy 
had so taxed her strength by her efforts in the 
Trentino that, for many months at least, 
nothing need be expected from her. But 
Italy showed the public that the "military 
experts" didn't know what they were talking 
about, for in little more than a month after 
the Italian guns had ceased to growl amid 
the Tyrolean peaks and passes, they were 
raining a storm of steel upon the Austrian 
positions on the Carso. 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 97 

Imagine a vast limestone plateau, varying 
in height from 700 to 2,500 feet, which is as 
treeless and waterless as the deserts of Chihua- 
hua, as desolate and forbidding as the Dakota 
Bad Lands, with a surface as torn and twisted 
and jagged as the lava beds of Utah, and with 
a summer climate like that of Death Valley 
in July. That is the Carso. This great table- 
land of rock, which begins at Gorizia, ap- 
proaches close to the shores of the Adriatic 
between Monfalcone and Trieste, and runs 
southeastward into Istria, links the Alpine 
system with the Balkan ranges. Its surface 
of naked, sun-flayed rock is broken here and 
there with gigantic heaps of piled stone, with 
caves and caverns, with sombre marshes which 
sometimes become gloomy and forbidding lakes, 
and with peculiar crater-like depressions called 
dolinas, formed by centuries of erosion. Such 
scanty vegetation as there is is confined to 
these dolinas, which form the only oases in 
this barren and thirsty land. The whole 
region is swept by the Bora, a wind which is 
the enemy alike of plant and man. Save for 
the lizards that bask upon its furnace-like 
floors, the Carso is as lifeless as it is treeless 



98 ITALY AT WAR 

and waterless. No bird and scarcely an insect 
can find nourishment over vast spaces of this 
sun-scorched solitude; even the hardy moun- 
tain grass withers and dies of a broken heart. 
So powerful is the sun that eggs can be cooked 
without a fire. Metal objects, such as rifles 
and equipment, when left exposed, quickly 
become too hot to touch. The bodies of the 
soldiers who fall on the Carso are not infre- 
quently found to have been baked hard and 
mummified after lying for a day or two on 
that oven-like floor of stone. 

The Carso is probably the strongest natural 
fortress in the world. Anything in the shape 
of defensive works which Nature had over- 
looked, the Austrians provided. For years 
before the war began the Austrian engineers 
were at work strengthening a place that al- 
ready possessed superlative strength. The 
whole face of the plateau was honeycombed 
with trenches and tunnels and dugouts and 
gun emplacements which were blasted and 
drilled out of the solid rock with machinery 
similar to that used in driving the Simplon and 
the St. Gothard tunnels. The posts for the 
snipers were armored with inch-thick plates of 




M 



hJ -s 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 99 

steel cemented into the rock. The dolinas 
were converted into machine-gun pits and 
bomb-proof shelters. In one of these curious 
craters I saw a dugout — it was really a subter- 
ranean barracks — electrically lighted and with 
neatly whitewashed walls which had sleeping 
accommodation for a thousand men. To sup- 
ply these positions, water was pumped up by 
oil-engines, but the Austrians took care to 
destroy the pipe-lines as they retired. 

At the northern end of the Carso, in an 
angle formed by the junction of the Wippach 
and the Isonzo, the snowy towers and red-brown 
roofs of Gorizia rise above the foliage of its 
famous gardens. The town, which resembles 
Homburg or Baden-Baden and was a popular 
Austrian resort before the war, lies in the 
valley of the Wippach (Vippacco, the Italians 
call it), which separates the Carso from the 
southernmost spurs of the Julian Alps. Down 
this valley runs the railway leading to Trieste, 
Laibach, and Vienna. It will be seen, there- 
fore, that Gorizia is really the gateway to 
Trieste, and a place of immense strategic im- 
portance. 

On the slopes of the Carso, four or five miles 



ioo ITALY AT WAR 

to the southwest of the town, rises the enor- 
mously strong position of Monte San Michele, 
and a few miles farther down the Isonzo, the 
fortified hill-town of Sagrado. On the other 
side of the river, almost opposite Gorizia, are 
the equally strong positions of Podgora and 
Monte Sabotino. Their steep slopes were 
slashed with Austrian trenches and abristle 
with guns which commanded the roads leading 
to the river, the bridge-heads, and the town. 
To take Gorizia until these positions had been 
captured was obviously out of the question. 
Here, as elsewhere, Austria held the upper 
ground. In a memorandum issued by the 
Austrian General Staff to its officers at the 
beginning of the operations before Gorizia, 
the tremendous advantage of the Austrian 
position was made quite clear: "We have to 
retain possession of a terrain fortified by 
Nature. In front of us a great watercourse; 
behind us a ridge from which we can shoot as 
from a ten-story building.'* 

The difficulties which the Italians had to 
overcome in their advance were enormous. 
From their mountain nests the Austrian guns 
were able to maintain a murderous fire on the 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 101 

Italian lines of communication, thus prevent- 
ing the bringing up of men and supplies. It 
therefore became necessary for the Italians to 
build new roads which would not be thus ex- 
posed to enemy fire, and in cases where this was 
impossible, the existing roads were masked for 
miles on end with artificial hedges and screens 
of grass matting. In many places it was found 
necessary to screen the roads overhead as well 
as on the sides, so that the Italians could 
move up their heavy guns without attracting 
the attention of the enemy's observers stationed 
on the highest mountain peaks, or of the Aus- 
trian airmen. But this was not all, or nearly 
all. An army is ever a hungry monster, so 
slaughter-houses and bakeries and field-kitchens, 
to say nothing of incredible quantities of food- 
stuffs, had to be provided. Fighting being a 
thirsty business, it was necessary to arrange for 
piping up water, for great tanks to hold that 
water, and for water-carts, hundreds and hun- 
dreds of them, to peddle it among the pant- 
ing troops. A prize-fighter cannot sleep out in 
the open, on the bare ground, and keep in con- 
dition for the ring, and a soldier, who is like- 
wise a fighting-man but from a different motive, 



102 ITALY AT WAR 

must be made comfortable of nights if he is 
to keep in fighting-trim. So millions of feet 
of lumber had to be brought up, along roads 
already overcrowded with traffic, and that 
lumber had to be transformed into temporary 
huts and barrackments — a city of them. But 
the preparations did not end even there. To 
insure the co-ordination and co-operation of 
the various divisions of the army, an elaborate 
system of field telegraphs and telephones had 
to be installed, and, in order to provide against 
the lines being cut by shell-fire and the whole 
complex organism paralyzed, the wires were 
laid in groups of four. Then there had to be 
repair-stations for the broken machinery, and 
other repair-stations — with Red Cross flags 
flying over them — for the broken men. So 
in the rear of the sector where the Italians 
planned to give battle on a front of thirty 
miles, a series of great base hospitals were 
established, and, nearer the front, a series of 
clearing-hospitals, and, still closer up, field- 
hospitals, and in the immediate rear of the 
fighting-line, hundreds of dressing-stations and 
first-aid posts were located in dugouts and 
bomb-proof shelters. And along the roads 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 103 

stretched endless caravans of gray ambulances, 
for it promised to be a bloody business. In 
other words, it was necessary, before the 
battle could be fought with any hope of success, 
to build what was to all intents and purposes 
a great modern city, a city of half a million in- 
habitants, with many miles of macadamized 
thoroughfares, with water and telephone and 
telegraph systems, with a highly efficient sani- 
tary service, with railways, with huge ware- 
houses filled with food and clothing, with more 
hospitals than any city ever had before, with 
butcher-shops and bakeries and machine-shops 
and tailors and boot-menders — in fact, with 
everything necessary to meet the demands of 
500,000 men. Yet Mr. Bryan and his fellow- 
members of the Order of the Dove and Olive- 
Branch would have us believe that all that is 
necessary in order to win a modern battle is 
to take the trusty target-rifle from the closet 
under the stairs, dump a box of cartridges into 
our pockets, and sally forth, whereupon the 
enemy, decimated by the deadliness of our fire, 
will be only too glad to surrender. 

The most formidable task which confronted 
the Italians was that of constructing the vast 



io 4 ITALY AT WAR 

system of trenches through which the troops 
could be moved forward in comparative safety 
to the positions from which would be launched 
the final assault. This presented no excep- 
tional difficulties in the rich alluvial soil on the 
Isonzo's western bank, but once the Italians 
had crossed the river they found themselves on 
the Carso, through whose solid rock the trenches 
could be driven only with pneumatic drills and 
dynamite. All of the Italian trenches that I 
saw showed a very high skill in engineering. 
Instead of keeping the earthen walls from 
crumbling and caving by the use of the wicker- 
work revetments so general on the Western 
Front, the Italians use a sort of steel trellis 
which is easily put in place, and is not readily 
damaged by shell-fire. Other trenches which 
I saw (though not on the Carso, of course) 
were built of solid concrete with steel shields 
for the riflemen cemented into the parapets. 

During these weeks of preparation the 
Italian aviators, observers, and spies had 
been busy collecting information concerning 
the strength of the Gorizia defenses and the 
disposition of the Austrian batteries and troops. 
By means of thousands of photographs taken 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 105 

from airplanes, enlarged, and then pieced to- 
gether, the Italians had as accurate and de- 
tailed a map of the Austrian lines of defense 
as was possessed by the Austrian General 
Staff itself. Thanks to the data thus obtained, 
the Italian gunners were able to locate their 
targets and estimate their ranges with ab- 
solute precision. They knew which building 
in Gorizia was the headquarters of the Aus- 
trian commander; they had discovered where 
his telephone and telegraph stations were 
located; and they had spotted his observation 
posts. Indeed, so highly developed was the 
Italian intelligence service that the Austrians 
were not able to transfer a battalion or change 
the position of a battery without the knowl- 
edge of General Cadorna. 

Now the Austrians, like the newspaper ex- 
perts, were convinced that the Italians had 
their hands full in the Trentino without court- 
ing trouble on the Isonzo. And if there was 
to be an attack along the Isonzo front — which 
they doubted — they believed that it would al- 
most certainly develop in the Monfalcone 
sector, next the sea. And of this belief the 
Italians took care not to disabuse them. Here 



106 ITALY AT WAR 

again was exemplified the vital necessity of 
having control of the air. If, during the latter 
half of July, the Austrian fliers had been able 
to get over the Italian lines, they could not 
have failed to observe the enormous prepara- 
tions which were in progress, and when the 
Italians advanced, the Austrians would have 
been ready for them. But the Italians kept 
control of the air (during my entire trip on 
the Italian front I can recall having seen only 
one Austrian airplane), the Austrians had no 
means of learning what was impending, and 
were, therefore, quite unprepared for the at- 
tack when it came — and Gorizia fell. 

By the 4th of August, 1916, all was ready 
for the Big Push. On the morning of that 
day brisk fighting began on the Monfalcone 
sector. Convinced that this was the danger- 
point, the Austrian commander rushed his re- 
serves southward to strengthen his threatened 
line. This was precisely what the Italians 
wanted. They had succeeded in distracting his 
attention from their real objective — Gorizia. 
Now the battle of Gorizia was really not fought 
at Gorizia at all. What happened was the 
brilliant and bloody storming of the Austrian 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 107 

positions on Podgora and Monte Sabotino, a 
simultaneous crossing of the Isonzo opposite 
Gorizia and at Sagrado, and a splendid rush 
up to and across the plateau of the Carso 
which culminated in the taking of Monte San 
Michele. Gorizia itself was not organized 
for defense, and so astounded was its garrison 
at the capture in rapid succession of the city's 
defending positions, which had been deemed 
impregnable, that no serious resistance was 
offered. 

On the morning of August 6 a hurricane 
of steel suddenly broke upon Gorizia. But the 
Italian gunners had received careful instruc- 
tions, and instead of blowing the city off the 
map, as they could easily have done, they 
confined their efforts to the destruction of the 
enemy's headquarters, observation posts, and 
telephone-stations, thus destroying his means 
of communication and effectually disrupting 
his entire organization. Other batteries turned 
their attention to the railway-station, the 
railway-yards, and the roads, dropping such 
a curtain of shell-fire behind the town that 
the Austrians were unable to bring up rein- 
forcements. Care was taken, however, to do 



io8 ITALY AT WAR 

as little damage as possible to the city itself, 
as the Italians wanted it for themselves. 

The most difficult, as it was the most spectac- 
ular, phase of the attack was the storming of 
the Sabotino, a mountain two thousand feet 
high, which, it was generally believed, could 
never be taken with the bayonet. The Italians, 
realizing that no troops in the world could 
hope to reach the summit of those steep slopes 
in the face of barbed wire, rifles, and machine- 
guns, had, unknown to the enemy, driven a 
tunnel, a mile and a quarter long, into the 
very heart of this position. When the assault 
was ordered, therefore, the first lines of Italian 
infantry suddenly appeared from out of the 
ground within a few yards of the Austrian 
trenches. Amid a storm of vivas the gray 
wave, with its crest of glistening steel, surged 
up the few remaining yards of glacis, topped 
the parapet, and overwhelmed the defenders. 
Monte Sabotino, the key to the bridge-head 
and the city, was in the hands of the Italians. 
But the Austrians intrenched on Hill 240, 
the highest summit of the Podgora range, 
still held out, and it took several hours of 
savage fighting to dislodge them. This last 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 109 

stronghold taken, the gray-clad infantry sud- 
denly debouched from the sheltering ravines 
and went swarming down to the Isonzo. Al- 
most simultaneously another division crossed 
the river several miles below, at Sagrado. 
Into the stream they went, their rifles held 
high above their heads, chanting the splendid 
hymn of Garibaldi. The Austrian shrapnel 
churned the river into foam, its waters turned 
from blue to crimson, but the insistent bugles 
pealed the charge, and the lines of gray swept 
on. Pausing on the eastern bank only long 
enough to reform, the lines again rolled for- 
ward. White disks carried high above the 
heads of the men showed the Italian gunners 
how far the infantry had advanced and en- 
abled them to gauge their protecting curtain 
of fire. Though smothered with shells, and 
swept by machine-guns, nothing could stop 
them. "Avanti Savoia !" they roared. /'Viva ! 
Eviva Italia!" 

Meanwhile, under a heavy fire, the Italian 
engineers were repairing the iron bridge which 
carried the railway from Milan and Udine 
across the Isonzo to Gorizia and so to Trieste 
and Vienna. The great stone bridge over the 



no ITALY AT WAR 

river had been destroyed the day before be- 
yond the possibility of immediate repair. In 
an amazingly short time the work was done 
and the Italian field-batteries went tearing 
over the bridge at a gallop to unlimber on the 
opposite bank and send a shower of shrapnel 
after the retreating Austrians. Close behind 
the guns poured Carabinieri, Alpini, Bersa- 
glieri, infantry of the line and squadron after 
squadron of cavalry riding under thickets of 
lances. A strong force of Carabinieri were the 
first troops to enter the city, and not until 
they had taken complete possession and had 
assumed the reins of the local government, 
were the line troops permitted to come in. 

The fighting continued for three days, the 
Austrians, though discouraged and to some 
extent demoralized, making a brave resistance. 
In one dolina which had been fortified, an 
officer and a handful of men fought so pluckily 
against overwhelming odds that, when at 
length the survivors came out and surrendered, 
the Italians presented arms to them as a mark 
of respect and admiration. By the evening 
of the 9th of August the attack, "one of the 
most important and violent onslaughts on 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE in 

fortified positions that the European War 
has yet seen," had been completely success- 
ful, and the city of Gorizia, together with the 
heights that guarded it, including the northern 
end of the Carso plateau, were in Italian hands. 
The cost to Italy was 20,000 dead men. It 
was a high price but, on the other hand, she 
captured 19,000 prisoners, 6j pieces of artil- 
lery, and scores of trench mortars and machine- 
guns. The moral and strategic results were of 
incalculable value. The first line of the Aus- 
trian defense, deemed one of the strongest on 
any front, had collapsed beneath the Italian 
assaults; though the crest of the Carso still 
remained in Austrian hands, the gateway to 
Trieste had been opened; and, most important 
of all, the Italian people had gained the self- 
confidence which they had long lacked and 
which comes only from military achievement. 

In order to reach Gorizia we had to motor 
for some miles along a road exposed to enemy 
fire, for the hills dominating the city to the 
south and east were still in Austrian hands. 
The danger was minimized as much as pos- 
sible by screening the roads in the manner I 
have already described, so, as the officer who 



ii2 ITALY AT WAR 

accompanied me took pains to explain, if we 
happened to be hit by a shell, it would be one 
fired at random. I could see no reason, how- 
ever, why a random shell wouldn't end my 
career just as effectually as a shell intended 
specially for me. Although, thanks to the 
tunnels of matting, the Austrians cannot see 
the traffic on the roads, they know that it 
must cross the bridges, so on them they keep 
up a continuous rain of projectiles, and there 
you have to take your chance. The Gorizia 
bridge-head was not a place where I should 
have cared to loiter. 

It is not a simple matter to obtain per- 
mission to visit Gorizia (it is much easier to 
visit Verdun), for the city is shelled with more 
or less regularity, and to have visitors about 
under such conditions is a nuisance. Hence, 
one cannot get into Gorizia unless bearing a 
special pass issued by the Comando Supremo. 
So rigid are the precautions against unauthor- 
ized visitors that, though accompanied by two 
officers of the Staff and travelling in a staff- 
car, we were halted by the Carabinieri and 
our papers examined seven times. To this 
famous force of constabulary has been given 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 113 

the work of policing the occupied regions, and, 
indeed, the entire zone of the armies. With 
their huge cocked hats, which, since the war 
began, have been covered with gray linen, 
their rosy faces, so pink-and-white that they 
look as though they had been rouged and 
powdered, and their little upturned waxed 
mustaches, the Carabinieri always remind me 
of the gendarmes in comic operas. But the 
only thing comic about them is their hats. 
They are the sternest and most uncompromis- 
ing guardians of the law that I know. You 
can expostulate with a London bobbie, you 
can argue with a Paris gendarme, you can on 
occasion reason mildly with a New York police- 
man, but not with an Italian carbineer. To 
give them back talk is to invite immediate 
and serious trouble. They are supreme in 
the war zone, for they take orders from no 
one save their own officers and have the au- 
thority to turn back or arrest any one, no 
matter what his rank. Our chauffeur, who, 
being attached to the Comando Supremo, had 
become so accustomed to driving generals and 
cabinet ministers that he blagued the mili- 
tary sentries, and quite openly sneered at the 



ii 4 ITALY AT WAR 

orders of the Udine police, would jam on his 
brakes so suddenly that we would almost go 
through the wind-shield if a carbineer held up 
his hand. 

Gorizia is, or was before the war, a place of 
some 40,000 inhabitants. It has broad streets, 
lined by fine white buildings and lovely gar- 
dens, and outside the town are excellent me- 
dicinal baths. It will, I think, prove a very 
popular summer resort with the Italians. 
Though for many months prior to its capture 
it was within range of the Italian guns, which 
could have blown it to smithereens, they re- 
frained from doing so because it was desired, 
if possible, to take the place intact. That, 
indeed, has been the Italian policy throughout 
the war: to do as little unnecessary damage 
as possible. Now the Austrians, who look 
down on their lost city from the heights to 
the eastward, refrain from destroying it, as 
they easily could do, because they cling to the 
hope that they may get it back again. So, 
though the bridge-heads are shelled constantly, 
and though considerable damage has been in- 
flicted on the suburbs, no serious harm has 
been done to the city itself. By this I do not 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 115 

mean to imply that the Austrians never shell 
it, for they do, but only in a desultory, half- 
hearted fashion. During the day that I spent 
in Gorizia the deserted streets echoed about 
every five minutes to the screech-bang of an 
Austrian arrive or the bang-screech of an Ital- 
ian depart. 

Finding that the big Hotel du Pare, which 
is the city's leading hostelry, was closed, we 
lunched at the more modest Hotel de la Poste. 
Our luncheon was served us in the kitchen, 
as, shortly before our arrival, the dining- 
room had been wrecked by an Austrian shell. 
Though this had naturally somewhat upset 
things, we had a really excellent meal: mine- 
strone, which, so far as I could discover, is the 
only variety of soup known to the Italians, 
mutton, vegetables, a pudding, fruit, the best 
coffee I have had in Europe since the war be- 
gan, and a bottle of fine old Austrian wine 
which, like the German vintages, is no longer 
procurable in the restaurants of civilized Eu- 
rope. While we ate, there was a brisk exchange 
of compliments between the Italian and Aus- 
trian batteries in progress above the roofs of 
the town. The table at which we sat was 



116 ITALY AT WAR 

pushed close up against one of the thick ma- 
sonry columns which supported the kitchen 
ceiling. It probably would not have been 
much of a protection had a shell chanced to 
drop in on us, but it was wonderfully comfort- 
ing. 

I was accompanied on my visit to Gorizia 
by Signor Ugo Ojetti, the noted Florentine 
connoisseur who has been charged with the 
preservation of all the historical monuments 
and works of art in the war zone. About this 
charming and cultured gentleman I was told 
a characteristic story. In the outskirts of 
Gorizia stands the chateau of an Austrian 
nobleman who was the possessor of a famous 
collection of paintings. Now it is Signor 
Ojetti's business to save from injury or de- 
struction all works of art which are worth 
saving, and, after ticketing and cataloguing 
them, to ship them to a place of safety to be 
kept until the war is over, when they will be 
restored to their respective owners. Though 
the chateau in question was within the Ital- 
ian lines, the windows of the ballroom, in 
which hung the best of the pictures, were 
within easy range of the Austrian snipers, 




"Gas!" 

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THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 117 

who, whenever they saw any one moving about 
inside, would promptly open a brisk rifle fire. 
Scarcely had Ojetti and his assistant set foot 
within the room when ping came an Austrian 
bullet through the window, shattering the 
crystal chandelier over their heads. Then 
was presented the extraordinary spectacle of 
the greatest art critic in Italy crawling on 
hands and knees over a ballroom floor, taking 
care to keep as close to that floor as possible, 
and pausing now and then to make a careful 
scrutiny of the canvases that hung on the 
walls above him. "That's probably an Al- 
lori," he would call to his assistant. "Re- 
member to take that down after it gets dark. 
The one next to it is good too — looks like a 
Bordone, though I can't be certain in this 
light. But don't bother about that picture 
over the fireplace — it's only a copy and not 
worth saving. Let the Austrians have it if 
they want it." And they told me that through 
it all he never once lost his dignity or his 
monocle. 

Another interesting figure who joined our 
little party in Gorizia was a monk who had 
served as a regimental chaplain since the be- 



u8 ITALY AT WAR 

ginning of the war. He was a broad-shoul- 
dered, brown-bearded fellow and, had it not 
been for the scarlet cross on the breast of his 
uniform, I should have taken him for a fine 
type of the Italian righting man. I rather 
suspect, though, that when the bugles pealed 
the signal for the attack, he quite forgot that 
the wearers of the Red Cross are supposed 
to be non-combatants. During the Austrian 
offensive in the Trentino, an Italian army 
chaplain was awarded the gold medal for 
valor, the highest military decoration, because 
he rallied the men of his regiment after all 
the officers had fallen and led them in the 
storming of an Austrian position held by a 
greatly superior force. Another chaplain who 
had likewise assumed command of officerless 
troops was awarded the silver medal for valor. 
As the duties of the army chaplains are sup- 
posed to be confined to giving the men spiritual 
advice, the doubt arose as to whether they 
were justified in actually fighting, thus risking 
the loss of their character as non-combatants. 
This puzzling question was, therefore, sub- 
mitted to the Pope, who decided that chap- 
plains assuming command of troops who had 



THE ROAD TO TRIESTE 119 

lost their officers in battle were merely dis- 
charging their duty, as they encouraged the 
men to resist in self-defense. In addition to 
the regimental chaplains there are, so I was 
told, thousands of priests and monks serving 
in the ranks of the Italian armies. Whether, 
after leading the exciting and adventurous life 
of a soldier, these men will be content to re- 
sume the sandals and the woollen robe, and to 
go back to the sheltered and monotonous ex- 
istence of the monastic orders, I very strongly 
doubt. In any event, their sympathies will 
have been deepened and their outlook on life 
immensely broadened. 

It rained in torrents during my stay in 
Gorizia, but, as we recrossed the Isonzo onto 
the Friulian plain, the sinking sun burst through 
a rift in the leaden clouds and turned into a 
huge block of rosy coral the red rampart of 
the Carso. Beyond that wall, scarce a dozen 
miles as the airplane flies, but many times 
that distance as the big gun travels, lies Trieste. 
It will be a long road, a hard road, a bloody 
road which the Italians must follow to at- 
tain their City of Desire, and before that 
journey is ended the red rocks of the Carso 



i2o ITALY AT WAR 

will be redder still. But they will finish the 
journey, I think. For these iron-hard, brown- 
faced men, remember, are the stuff from which 
was made those ever-victorious legions that 
built the Roman Empire — and it is the dream 
of founding another Empire which is beckon- 
ing them on. 



V 

WITH THE RUSSIANS IN 
CHAMPAGNE 

WHEN the French have been pestered 
for permission to visit the front by 
some foreigner — usually an Ameri- 
can — until their patience has been exhausted, 
or when there comes to Paris a visitor to 
whom, for one reason or another, they wish to 
show attention, they send him to Rheims. Art- 
ists, architects, ex-ambassadors, ex-congress- 
men, lady journalists, manufacturers in quest 
of war orders, bankers engaged in floating loans, 
millionaires who have given or are likely to 
give money to war-charities, editors of obscure 
newspapers and monthly magazines, are packed 
off weekly, in personally conducted parties of 
a dozen or more, on a day's excursion to the 
City of the Desecrated Cathedral. They grow 
properly indignant over the cathedral's shat- 
tered beauties, they visit the famous wine- 
cellars, they hear the occasional crack of a 



122 ITALY AT WAR 

rifle or the crash of a field-gun,* and, upon 
their return, they write articles for the maga- 
zines, and give lectures, and to their friends 
at home send long letters — usually copied in 
the local papers — describing their experiences 
"on the firing-line." "Visiting the front" 
has, indeed, become as popular a pastime 
among Americans in Paris as was racing at 
Longchamps and Auteuil before the war. 
Hence, no place in the entire theatre of war has 
had so much advertising as Rheims. No sector 
of the front has been visited by so many civil- 
ians. That is why I am not going to say any- 
thing about Rheims — at least about its cathe- 
dral. For there is nothing left to say. 

Five minutes of brisk walking from the 
cathedral brings one to the entrance to the 
famous wine-cellars of Pommery et Cie, the 
property of the ancient family of de Polignac. 
The space in this underground city is about 
equally divided between champagne and civil- 
ians, for several hundred of the townspeople, 
who sought refuge here in the opening weeks 

* Since this was written the Germans have bombarded Rheims 
so heavily, with the evident intention of completing its destruc- 
tion, that the French military authorities have ordered the evacu- 
ation of the civil population. 



THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE 123 

of the war, still make these gloomy passages 
their home. As the caves have a mean tem- 
perature of fifty degrees Fahrenheit they are 
comfortable enough, and, as they are fifty 
feet below the surface of the earth, they are 
safe. So there the more timid citizens live, 
rent-free, and will continue to live, no doubt, 
until the end of the war. In normal times, 
there are shipped from these cellars each day 
thirty thousand bottles of champagne, and 
even now, despite the proximity of the Germans 
— their trenches are only a few hundred yards 
away — the work of packing and shipping goes 
on much as usual, though, of course, on a greatly 
reduced scale, averaging, so I was told, eight 
thousand bottles daily. By far the greater 
part of this goes to America, for nowadays 
Europeans do not buy champagne. 

To the red-faced, white-waistcoated, pros- 
perous-looking gentlemen who scan so carefully 
the hotel wine-lists, I feel sure that it will come 
as a relief to learn that, though there was no 
1916 crop of champagne, the vintages of 1914 
and 191 5 were exceptionally fine — grands vins 
they will probably be labelled. (And they 
ought to be, for the vines were watered with 



i2 4 ITALY AT WAR 

the bravest blood of France.) I don't suppose 
it would particularly interest those same com- 
placent gentlemen, though, were I to add that 
the price of one of those gilt-topped bottles 
would keep a French child from cold and 
hunger for a month. 

A few hours before I visited the cellars, a 
workman, loading cases of champagne in front 
of the company's offices for export to the 
United States, was blown to pieces by a Ger- 
man shell. They showed me the shattered 
columns of the office-building, and on the 
cobbles of the little square pointed out an ugly 
stain. So, when I returned to America, and 
in a famous restaurant, where I was dining, 
saw white-shirted men and white-shouldered 
women sipping glasses abrim with the spark- 
ling wine of Rheims, the picture of those blood- 
stained cobbles in that French city flashed 
before me, and I experienced a momentary 
sensation of disgust, for it seemed to me that 
in the amber depths I caught a stain of crimson. 
But of course it was only my imagination. 
Still, I was glad when it came time to leave, 
for the scene was too suggestive in its con- 
trast to be pleasant: we, in America, eating 




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THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE 125 

and drinking and laughing; they, over there 
in Europe, fighting and suffering and hunger- 
ing. 

Leaving Rheims, we took a great gray car 
and drove south, ever south, until, as darkness 
was falling, we reached the headquarters of 
General Jilinsky, commanding the Russian 
forces fighting in Champagne. Here the Rus- 
sians have two infantry brigades, with a total 
of 16,000 men; there is a third brigade at 
Salonika. The last time the Russians were in 
France was in 18 14, and then they were there 
for a different purpose. Little could Napoleon 
have dreamed that they, who helped to de- 
throne him, would come back, a century later, 
as France's allies. Yet this war has produced 
stranger coincidences than that. The British 
armies, disembarking at Rouen, tramp through 
that very square where their ancestors burned 
the Maid of Orleans. And at Pont des Briques, 
outside Boulogne, where Napoleon waited impa- 
tiently for weeks in the hope of being able to in- 
vade England, is now situated the greatest of 
the British base camps. 

General Jilinsky reminded me of a fighting- 



126 ITALY AT WAR 

cock. He is a little man, much the height and 
build of the late General Funston, with hair 
cropped close to the skull, after the Russian 
fashion; through a buttonhole of his green 
service tunic was drawn the orange-and-black 
ribbon of the Order of St. George. He can 
best be described as "a live wire." His staff- 
officers impressed me as being as efficient and 
razor-keen as their chief. The general asked 
me if I would like to visit his trenches, and I 
assured him that it was the hope of being per- 
mitted to do so which had brought me there. 
Whereupon a staff-officer disappeared into the 
hall to return a moment later with a gas-mask 
in a tin case and a steel helmet covered with 
tan linen. 

"You had better take these with you," he 
said. "There is nearly always something hap- 
pening on our front, and there is no sense in 
taking unnecessary risks." 

I soon found that the precaution was not an 
idle one, for, as our car drew up at the en- 
trance to the boyau which led by devious wind- 
ings into the first-line trenches, the group of 
officers and men assembled in front of brigade 
headquarters were hastily donning their masks: 



THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE 127 

grotesque-looking contrivances of metal, cloth, 
and rubber, which in shape resembled a pig's 
snout. 

"Gas," said my Russian companion briefly. 
"We will stay here until it is over." 

Though we must have been nearly a mile 
behind the firing-line, the air was filled with a 
sweetish, sickish smell which suggested both 
the operating-room and the laboratory. So 
faint and elusive was the odor that I hesi- 
tated to follow the example of the others and 
don my mask, until I remembered having been 
told at Souchez, on the British front, that a 
horse had been killed by gas when seven miles 
behind the lines. 

It is a logical development of this use of 
chemicals as weapons that the horses in use 
on the French front are now provided with 
gas-masks in precisely the same manner as 
the soldiers. These masks, which are kept 
attached to the harness, ready for instant 
use, do not cover the entire face, as do those 
worn by the men, but only the mouth and 
nostrils. In fact they resemble the feeding- 
bags which cartmen and cab-drivers put on 
their horses for the midday meal. Generally 



128 ITALY AT WAR 

speaking, the masks are provided only for ar- 
tillery horses and those employed in hauling 
ammunition, though it now seems likely that 
if the cavalry gets a chance to go into action, 
masks will be worn by the troopers and their 
horses alike. After a large gas attack the 
fumes sometimes settle down in the valleys 
far behind the lines, and hours may elapse 
before they are dissipated by the wind. As 
it not infrequently happens that one of these 
gas banks settles over a road on which it is 
imperative that the traffic be not interrupted, 
large signs are posted notifying all drivers to 
put the masks on their horses before entering 
the danger zone. 

There are now three different kinds of gases 
in general use on the Western Front. The best 
known of these is a form of chlorine gas, which 
is liberated from cylinders or flasks, to be car- 
ried by the wind over the enemy's lines. Con- 
trary to the popular impression, its use is not 
as general as the newspaper accounts have 
led the public to believe, for it requires elab- 
orate preparation, can only be employed over 
comparatively flat ground, and then only 
when the wind is of exactly the right velocity, 



THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE 129 

neither too light nor too strong. Another form 
of asphyxiating gas is held in shells in liquid 
form, usually in lead containers. Upon the 
bursting of the shell, which is fired from an 
ordinary field-gun, the liquid rapidly evap- 
orates and liberates the gas, a few inhalations 
of which are sufficient to cause death. The 
third type consists of lachrymal, or tear-pro- 
ducing, gas, which is used in the same way as 
the asphyxiating, but its effects are not fatal, 
merely putting a man out of action for a few 
hours. It is really, however, the most efficacious 
of the three types, as it does not evaporate as 
readily as the asphyxiating gas. As a well 
distributed fire of lachrymal shells will form a 
screen of gas which will last for several hours, 
they are often used during an attack to prevent 
the enemy from bringing up reinforcements. 
Another use is against artillery positions, the 
clouds of gas from the lachrymal shells making 
it almost impossible for the men to serve the 
guns. I was also told of these shells having 
been used with great success to surround the 
headquarters of a divisional commander, dis- 
abling him and his entire staff during an at- 
tack. 



i 3 o ITALY AT WAR 

Before a change in the wind dissipated the 
last odors of gas, darkness had fallen. "Now," 
said my cicerone, "we will resume our trip to 
the trenches." The last time that I had seen 
these trenches, which the Russians are now 
holding, was in October, 191 5, during the great 
French offensive in Champagne, when I had 
visited them within a few hours after their 
capture by the French. On that occasion they 
had been so pounded by the French artillery 
that they were little more than giant furrows in 
the chalky soil, and thickly strewn along those 
furrows was all the horrid garbage of a battle- 
field: twisted and tangled barbed wire, splin- 
tered planks, shattered rifles, broken machine- 
guns, unexploded hand-grenades, knapsacks, 
water-bottles, pieces of uniforms, bits of leather, 
and, most horrible of all, the remains of what 
had once been human beings. But all this 
debris had long since been cleared away. Un- 
der the skilful hands of the Russians the re- 
built trenches had taken on a neat and orderly 
appearance. The earthen walls had been re- 
vetted with wire chicken-netting, and instead 
of tramping through ankle-deep mud, we had 
beneath our feet neat walks of corduroy. We 



THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE 131 

tramped for what seemed interminable miles 
in the darkness, always zigzagging. Now and 
then we would come upon little fires, discreetly 
screened, built at the entrances to dugouts 
burrowed from the trench-walls. Over these 
fires soldiers in flat caps and belted greatcoats 
were cooking their evening meal. I had ex- 
pected to see unkempt men wearing sheepskin 
caps, men with flat noses and matted beards, 
but instead I found clean-shaven, splendidly 
set-up giants, with the pink skins that come 
from perfect cleanliness and perfect health. 
Following the direction of the arrows on signs 
printed in both French and Russian, we at 
last reached the fire-trench, where dim figures, 
looking strangely mediaeval in their steel hel- 
mets, crouched motionless, peering out along 
their rifle-barrels into the eerie darkness of 
No Man's Land. Here there was a sporadic 
illumination, for from the German trenches in 
front of us lights were rising and falling. 
They were very beautiful: slender stems of 
fire arching skyward to burst into blossoms of 
brilliant sparks, which illuminated the band 
of shell-pocked soil between the trenches as 
though it were day. Occasionally there Would 



132 ITALY AT WAR 

be a dozen of these star-shells in the air at the 
same time: they reminded me of the Fourth 
of July fireworks at Manhattan Beach. In the 
fire-trenches there is no talking save in whis- 
pers, but every now and then the almost un- 
canny silence would be punctuated by the 
sharp crack of a rifle, the tut-tut-tut of a mitrail- 
leuse, or, from somewhere in the distance, the 
angry bark of a field-gun. 

There was a whispered conversation between 
the officer in command of the trench and my 
guide. The latter turned to me. 

"We have driven a sap to within thirty 
metres of the enemy," he said, "and have 
established a listening-post out there. Would 
you care to go out to it ?" 

I would, and said so. 

"No talking, then, if you please," he warned 
me, "and as little noise as possible." 

This time the boyau was very narrow, and 
writhed between its earthen walls like a dying 
snake. We advanced on tiptoe, as cautiously 
as though stalking big game — as, indeed, we 
were. Ten minutes of this slow and tortuous 
progress brought us to the poste d'ecoute. In 
a space the size of a hall bedroom half a score 



THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE 133 

of men stood in attitudes of strained expec- 
tancy, staring into the blackness through the 
loopholes in their steel shields. There being 
no loophole vacant, I took a chance and, 
standing on the firing step, raised my head 
above the level of the parapet and made a 
hurried survey of the few yards of No Man's 
Land which separated us from the enemy — a 
space so narrow that I could have thrown a 
stone across, yet more impassable than the 
deepest chasm. I was rewarded for the risk 
by getting a glimpse of a dim maze of wire 
entanglements, and, just beyond, a darker 
bulk which I knew for the German trench. 
And I knew that from that trench sharp eyes 
were peering out into the darkness toward us 
just as we were trying to discern them. As I 
stepped down from my somewhat exposed 
position a soldier standing a few feet farther 
along the line raised his head above the para- 
pet, as though to relieve his cramped muscles. 
Just then a star-shell burst above us, turning 
the trench into day. Ping ! ! ! There was a 
ringing metallic sound, as when a 22-caliber 
bullet strikes the target in a shooting-gallery, 
and the big soldier who had incautiously ex- 



i 3 4 ITALY AT WAR 

posed himself crumpled up in the bottom of 
the trench with a bullet through his helmet 
and through his brain. The young officer in 
command of the listening-post cursed softly. 
"I'm forever warning the men not to expose 
themselves," he said irritatedly, "but they 
forget it the next minute. They're nothing 
but stupid children." He spoke in much the 
same tone of annoyance he might have used 
if the man had been a clumsy servant who 
had broken a valuable dish. Then he went 
into the tiny dugout where the telephone was, 
and rang up the trench commander, and asked 
him to send out a bearer, for the boyau com- 
municating with the listening-post was too 
narrow to admit the passage of a stretcher. 
The bearer arrived just as we started to re- 
turn. He was a regular dray-horse of a man, 
with shoulders as massive and competent as 
those of a Constantinople hamel. Strapped to 
his back by a sort of harness was a contrivance 
which looked like a rude armchair with the 
legs cut off. His comrades hoisted the dead 
man onto the back of the live man, and with 
a rope took a few turns about the bodies of 
both. As we made our slow way back to the 



THE RUSSIANS IN CHAMPAGNE 135 

fire-trench, and so to the rear, there stumbled 
at our heels the grunting porter with his ghastly 
burden. Now and then I would glance over 
my shoulder and, in the fleeting glare of the 
star-shells, would glimpse, above the porter's 
straining shoulders, the head of the dead sol- 
dier lolling inertly from side to side, as though 
very, very tired. . . . And I wondered if in 
some lonely cabin by the Volga a woman was 
praying for her boy. 



VI 
"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 

GENERAL Gouraud, the one-armed hero 
of Gallipoli, who commands the forces 
in Champagne, is the most picturesque 
and gallant figure in all the armies of France. 
On my way south I stopped for a night in 
Chalons-sur-Marne to dine with him. He was 
living in a comfortable but modest house, 
evidently the residence of a prosperous trades- 
man. When I arrived I found the small and 
rather barely furnished salon filled with of- 
ficers of the staff, in uniforms of the beautiful 
horizon blue which is the universal dress of 
the French army. They were clustered about 
the marble-topped centre-table, on which, I 
imagine, the family Bible used to rest, but 
which now held the steel base of a 380-centi- 
metre shell, which had fallen in a near-by vil- 
lage that afternoon. This monster projectile, 
as large as the largest of those fired by our 
coast-defense guns, must have weighed con- 
136 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 137 

siderably more than a thousand pounds and 
doubtless cost the Germans at least a thousand 
dollars, yet all the damage it had done was to 
destroy a tumble-down and uninhabited cot- 
tage, which proves that, save against per- 
manent fortifications, there is a point where 
the usefulness of these abnormally large guns 
ceases. While we were discussing this speci- 
men of Bertha Krupp's handicraft, the door 
opened and General Gouraud entered the 
room. Seldom have I seen a more striking 
figure: a tall, slender, graceful man, with a 
long, brown, spade-shaped beard which did 
not entirely conceal a mouth both sensitive 
and firm. But it was the eyes which attracted 
and held one's attention: great, lustrous eyes, 
as large and tender as a woman's, but which 
could on occasion, I fancy, become cold as 
steel, or angry as lightning. One sleeve of 
his tunic hung empty, and he leaned heavily 
on a cane, for during the landing at Gallipoli 
he was terribly wounded by a Turkish shell. 
Covering his breast were glittering stars and 
crosses, which showed how brilliant had been 
his services in this and other wars. He is a 
remarkable man, this soldier with the beard 



138 ITALY AT WAR 

of a poilu and the eyes of a poet, and, unless 
I am greatly mistaken, he is destined to go a 
long, long way. 

It was the sort of dinner that one marks 
with a white milestone on the road of memory. 
The soldier-servants wore white-cotton gloves 
and there were flowers on the table and menus 
with quaint little military sketches in the 
corners. General Gouraud talked in his deep, 
melodious voice of other wars in which he had 
fought, in Annam and Morocco and Madagas- 
car, and the white-mustached old general of 
artillery at my left illustrated, with the aid of 
the knives and forks, a new system of artillery 
fire which, he assured me very earnestly, 
would make pudding of the German trenches. 
While the salad was being served one of the 
staff-officers was called to the telephone. When 
he returned the general raised inquiring eye- 
brows. "N' 'import?, mon general" he an- 
swered. "Colonel telephoned that the 

Boches attacked in force south of " and 

he named a certain sector, "but that we have 
driven them back with heavy losses." Then 
he resumed his interrupted dinner as uncon- 
cernedly as though he had been called to the 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 139 

telephone to be told that the Braves had de- 
feated the Pirates in the ninth inning. 

While we were at breakfast the next morn- 
ing the windows of the hotel dining-room sud- 
denly began to reverberate to the bang-bang- 
bang of guns. Going to the door, we saw, high 
overhead, a great white bird, which turned to 
silver when touched by the rays of the morn- 
ing sun. Though shrapnel bursts were all 
about it — I counted thirty of the fleecy puffs at 
one time — it sailed serenely on, a thing of deli- 
cate beauty against the cloudless blue. Though 
few airplanes are brought down by artillery 
fire, the improvement in anti-aircraft guns 
has forced the aviators to keep at a height of 
from 12,000 to 17,000 feet, instead of 2,000, 
as they did at the beginning of the war. The 
French gunners have now devised a system 
which, when it is successfully executed, makes 
things extremely uncomfortable for the enemy 
aviator. This system consists in so gauging 
the fire of the anti-aircraft guns that the air- 
man finds himself in a "box" of shrapnel; 
that is, one shell is timed to burst directly in 
front of the machine, another behind it, one 
above, one below, and one on either side. The 



140 ITALY AT WAR 

dimensions of this "box" of bursting shrapnel 
are gradually made smaller, so that, unless the 
aviator recognizes his danger in time, escape 
becomes impossible, and he is done for. Occa- 
sionally an aviator, rinding himself caught in 
such a death-trap, pretends that he has been 
hit, and lets his machine flutter helplessly 
earthward, like a wounded bird, until the gun- 
ners, believing themselves certain of their 
prey, cease firing, whereupon the airman skil- 
fully "catches" himself, and, straightening the 
planes of his machine, goes soaring off" to safety. 
Navarre, one of the most daring of the French 
fliers, so perfected himself in the execution of 
this hazardous ruse that he would let go of 
the controls and permit his machine to literally 
fall, sometimes from a height of a mile or more, 
making no attempt at recovery until within 
sixty metres of the ground, when he would 
save himself by a hawk-like swoop in which 
his wheels would actually graze the earth. 

The organization of the French air service, 
with its system of airplane and seaplane 
squadrons, dirigibles and observation balloons, 
schools, repair-shops, and manufactories, is 
entirely an outgrowth of the war. The air- 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 141 

planes are organized in escadrilles> usually com- 
posed of ten machines each, for three distinct 
purposes. The bombardment squadrons are 
made up of slow machines with great carrying 
capacity, such as the Voisin; the pursuit or 
battle squadrons — the escadrilles de chasse — 
are composed of small and very fast 'planes, 
such as the Spad and Nieuport; while the 
general utility squadrons, used for reconnois- 
sance, artillery regulation, and photographing, 
usually consist of medium-speed, two-passenger 
machines like the Farman and the Caudron. 

Until very recently the Nieuport biplane, 
which can attain a speed of one hundred and 
ten miles an hour, has been considered the 
fastest and most efficient, as it is the smallest, 
of the French battle-planes, but it is now out- 
speeded by the new Spad* machine, which has 
reached a speed of over one hundred and twenty 
miles an hour, and of which great hopes are 
entertained. The Spad, like the Nieuport, is a 
one-man apparatus, the machine-gun mounted 
on its upper plane being fired by the pilot with 
one hand, while with the other hand and his 
feet he operates his controls. On the "trac- 

* A nickname for the Hispana-Suiza. 



i 4 2 ITALY AT WAR 

tors," as the airplanes having the propellers 
in front are called, the machine-guns are syn- 
chronized so as to fire between the whirling 
blades. Garros, the famous French flier, was 
the first man to perfect a device for firing a 
machine-gun through a propeller. He armored 
the blades so that if struck by a bullet they 
would not be injured. This was greatly im- 
proved upon by the Germans in the Fokker 
type, the fire of the machine-gun being auto- 
matically regulated so that it is never dis- 
charged when a blade of the propeller is directly 
in front of the muzzle. Since then various 
forms of this device have been adapted by all 
the belligerents. Another novel development 
of aerial warfare is the miniature wireless- 
sending apparatus with which most of the ob- 
servation and artillery regulation machines are 
now equipped, thus enabling the observers 
to keep in constant touch with the ground. 
In addition to developing the fastest possible 
battle-planes, the French are making efforts 
to build more formidable craft for bombing 
purposes. The latest of these is a Voisin tri- 
plane, which has a total lifting capacity of 
two tons, carries a crew of five men, and is 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 143 

driven by four propellers, each operated by a 
210-horse-power Hispana-Suiza motor. These 
new motors weigh only about two hundred 
kilograms, or a little over two pounds per 
horse-power. 

During the past year the French have made 
most of their raids by night. One reason for 
this is that raiding craft, which are compara- 
tively slow machines, are so heavily laden 
with bombs that they are only able to perform 
straight flying and hence are easily brought 
down by the fast and quick-turning battle- 
planes. Daylight raids, moreover, necessitate 
an escorting fleet of fighting craft in order to 
protect the bombing machines, just as a dread- 
naught has to be protected by a screen of de- 
stroyers. Though the dangers of flying are 
considerably increased by darkness, the French 
believe this is more than compensated for by 
the fact that, being comparatively safe from at- 
tack by enemy aircraft or from the fire of anti- 
aircraft guns, the raiders can fly at a much 
lower altitude and consequently have a much 
better chance of hitting their targets. 

One of the extremely important uses to 
which airplanes are now put is the destruction 



144 ITALY AT WAR 

of the enemy's observation balloons, on which 
he depends for the regulation of his artillery 
fire. An airplane which is to be used for this 
work is specially fitted with a number of rocket 
tubes which project in all directions, so that 
it looks like a pipe-organ gone on a spree. The 
rockets, which are fired by means of a keyboard 
not unlike that of a clavier, are loaded with a 
composition containing a large percentage of 
phosphorus and are fitted with gangs of barbed 
hooks. If the rocket hits the balloon these 
hooks catch in the envelope and hold it there, 
while the phosphorus bursts into a flame which 
it is impossible to extinguish. During the 
fighting before Verdun, eight French aviators, 
driving machines thus equipped, were ordered 
to attack eight German balloons. Six of the 
balloons were destroyed. 

But the very last word in aeronautical de- 
velopment is what might be called, for want 
of a better term, an aerial submarine. I refer 
to seaplanes carrying in clips beneath the 
fuselage specially constructed 1 8-inch torpe- 
does. In the under side of this type of torpedo 
is an opening. When the torpedo is dropped 
into the sea the water, pouring into this open- 




The Eyes of the Guns. 

The fire of the artillery is regulated by the officers in the observation balloons. 
Their destruction means, therefore, the blinding of the guns. 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 145 

ing, sets the propelling mechanism in motion 
and the projectile goes tearing away on its 
errand of destruction precisely as though fired 
from the torpedo-tube of a submarine. It 
may be recalled that some months ago the 
papers printed an account of a Turkish trans- 
port, loaded with soldiers, having been torpe- 
doed in the Sea of Marmora, the accepted 
explanation being that a submarine had suc- 
ceeded in making its way through the Dar- 
danelles. As a matter of fact, that transport 
was sunk by a torpedo dropped from the air ! 
The pilot of a Short seaplane had winged his 
way over the Gallipoli Peninsula, had sighted 
the troop-laden transport steaming across the 
Marmora Sea, and, volplaning down until 
he was only twenty-five feet above the water 
and a few hundred yards from the doomed 
vessel, had jerked the lever which released 
the torpedo. As it struck the water its ma- 
chinery was automatically set going, something 
that looked like a giant cigar went streaking 
through the waves . . . there was a shattering 
explosion, and when the smoke cleared away 
the transport had disappeared. Whereupon 
the airman, his mission accomplished, flew 



146 ITALY AT WAR 

back to his base in the iEgean. There may be 
stranger developments of the war than that, 
but if so I have not heard of them. 

France is now (April, 191 7) turning out 
between eight hundred and a thousand com- 
pletely equipped airplanes a month, but a 
considerable proportion of these are for the 
use of her allies. I have asked many persons 
who ought to know how many airplanes France 
has in commission, and, though the replies 
varied considerably, I should say that she has 
at present somewhere between five thousand 
and seven thousand machines in or ready to 
take the air.* 

Leaving Chalons in the gray dawn of a win- 
ter's morn, we fled southward again, through 
Bar-le-Duc (the place, you know, where the 
jelly comes from) the words "Caves voutes" 
chalked on the doors of those buildings having 
vaulted cellars showing that air raids were of 
frequent occurrence, and so, through steadily 
increasing traffic, to Souilly, the obscure ham- 

* Though great numbers of American-built airplanes have been 
shipped to Europe, they are being used only for purposes of in- 
struction, as they are not considered fast enough for work on 
the front. 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 147 

let from which was directed the defense of 
Verdun. In the centre of the cobble-paved 
Grande Place stood the Mairie, a two-story 
building in the uncompromising style character- 
istic of most French provincial architecture. 
At the foot of the steps stood two sentries in 
mud-caked uniforms and dented helmets, and 
through the front door flowed an endless stream 
of stafF-officers, orderlies, messengers, and 
mud-spattered despatch riders. In this village 
mairie, a score of miles behind the firing-line, 
were centred the nerve and vascular systems 
of an army of half a million men; here was 
planned and directed the greatest battle of 
all time. On the upper floor, in a large, light, 
scantily furnished room, a man with a great 
silver star on the breast of his light-blue tunic 
sat at a table, bent over a map. He had rather 
sparse gray hair and a gray mustache and a 
little tuft of gray below the lower lip. His 
eyes were sunken and tired-looking, as though 
from lack of sleep, and his face and forehead 
were deeply lined, but he gave the impression, 
nevertheless, of possessing immense vitality and 
energy. He was a broad-shouldered, solidly 
built, four-square sort of man, with cool, level 



i 4 8 ITALY AT WAR 

eyes, and a quiet, almost taciturn manner. It 
was General Robert Nivelle, the man who held 
Verdun for France. He it was who, when the 
fortress was quivering beneath the Germans' 
sledge-hammer blows, had quietly remarked: 
"They shall not pass !" And they did not. 

I did not remain long with General Nivelle; 
to have taken much of such a man's time would 
have been a rank impertinence. I would go 
to Verdun ? he inquired. Yes, with his per- 
mission, I answered. Everything had been 
arranged, he assured me. An officer who knew 
America well — Commandant Bunau-Varilla, of 
Panama Canal fame — had been assigned to 
go with me.* As I was leaving I attempted to 
express to him the admiration which I felt for 
the fashion in which he had conducted the 
Great Defense. But with a gesture he waved 
the compliment aside. "It is the men out 
there in the trenches who should be thanked," 
he said. "They are the ones who are holding 
Verdun." I took away with me the impres- 
sion of a man as stanch, as confident, as un- 
conquerable as the city he had so heroically 

* Commandant Bunau-Varilla was really sent as a compliment 
to my companion, Mr. Arthur Page, editor of The World's Work. 




o 



O o 

o fe 



■go 



G 

P 

ID 

It 

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"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 149 

defended. A few weeks later he was to succeed 
Marshal Joffre to the highest field command in 
the gift of the French Government. 

It is twenty miles from Souilly to Verdun, 
and the road has come to be known as La Voie 
Sacre — the Sacred Way — because on the un- 
interrupted flow of ammunition and supplies 
over that road depended the safety of the 
fortress. Three thousand men with picks and 
shovels, working day and night, kept the road 
in condition to bear up under the enormous 
volume of traffic. The railway to Verdun 
was so repeatedly cut by German shells that 
the French built a narrow-gauge line, which 
zigzags over the hills. Beside the road, at 
frequent intervals, I noted cisterns and water- 
ing-troughs, and huge overhead water-tanks; 
for an army — men, horses, and motor-cars — is 
incredibly thirsty. This elaborate water sys- 
tem is the work of Major Bunau-Varilla, who, 
fittingly enough, is the head of the Service 
d'Eau des Armees. 

Half a dozen miles out of Souilly we crossed 
the watershed between the Seine and the 
Rhine and were in the valley of the Meuse. On 
the other side of yonder hill, whence came a 



ISO ITALY AT WAR 

constant muttering of cannon, was, I knew, 
the Unconquerable City. 

While yet Verdun itself was out of sight, 
we came, quite unexpectedly, upon one of its 
mightiest defenders: a 400-millimetre gun 
mounted on a railway-truck. So streaked and 
striped and splashed and mottled with many 
colors was it that, monster though it was, it 
escaped my notice until we were almost upon 
it. Suddenly a score or more of grimy men, 
its crew, came pelting down the track, as sub- 
way laborers run for shelter when a blast is 
about to be set off. A moment later came a 
mighty bellow; from the up-turned nose of 
the monster burst a puff of smoke pierced 
by a tongue of flame, and an invisible express- 
train went roaring eastward in the direction 
of the German lines. This was the mighty 
weapon of which I had heard rumors but had 
never seen: the great 16-inch howitzer with 
which the French had so pounded Fort Douau- 
mont as to cause its evacuation by the Ger- 
mans. 

The French artillerists were such firm be- 
lievers in the superiority of light over heavy 
artillery, and pinned such faith to their 75's, 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 151 

that they had paid scant attention to the ques- 
tion of heavy mobile guns. Hence when the 
German tidal wave rolled Parisward in 1914, 
the only heavy artillery possessed by the French 
consisted of a very few 4.2-inch Creusot guns 
of a model adopted just prior to the war, and 
a limited number of batteries of 4.8-inch and 
6.1-inch guns and howitzers; all of them, 
save only the 6.1-inch Rimailho howitzer of 
1904, being models twenty to forty years old. 
These pieces were, of course, vastly outclassed 
in range and smashing power by the heavy 
guns of the Central Powers, such as the Ger- 
man 420's (the famous "42V) and the Aus- 
trian 380's. Undismayed, however, the French 
set energetically to work to make up their 
deficiencies. As it takes time to manufacture 
guns, large numbers of naval pieces were 
pressed into service, most of them being 
mounted on railway-trucks, thus insuring ex- 
treme mobility. The German 42's, I might 
mention in passing, lack this very essential 
quality, as they can be fired only from specially 
built concrete bases, from which they cannot 
readily be moved. The two German 42's 
which pounded to pieces the barrier forts of 



1 52 ITALY AT WAR 

Antwerp were mounted on concrete platforms 
behind a railway embankment near Malines, 
where they remained throughout the siege of 
the city. 

Some idea may be had of the variety of artil- 
lery in use on the French front when I mention 
that there are at least eleven calibers of guns, 
howitzers, and mortars, ranging in size from 
9 inches to 20.8 inches, in action between 
Switzerland and the Somme. All of these, 
with a very few exceptions, are mounted on 
railway-trucks. In fact, the only large cali- 
bered piece not thus mounted is the Schneider 
mortar, a very efficient weapon, having a re- 
markably smooth recoil, which has a range of 
over six miles. It is transported, with its car- 
riage and platform, in six loads, each weigh- 
ing from four to five tons, about four hours 
being required to set up the piece ready for 
firing. Nearly all of these railway guns are, I 
understand, naval or coast-defense pieces, some 
of them being long-range weapons cut down to 
form howitzers or mortars, while others have 
been created by boring to a larger caliber a gun 
whose rifling had been worn out in use. For ex- 
ample, the 400-millimetre, already referred to 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 153 

as having proved so effective against Douau- 
mont, was, I am told, made by cutting down 
and boring out a 13.6-inch naval gun. But the 
master gun, the very latest product of French 
brains and French foundries, is the huge 520- 
millimetre (20.8-inch) howitzer which has just 
been completed at the Schneider works at 
Creusot. This, the largest gun in existence, 
has a length of 16 calibers (that is, sixteen times 
its bore, or approximately 28 feet), and weighs 
60 tons. It fires a shell 7 feet long, weighing 
nearly 3,000 pounds, and carrying a bursting 
charge of 660 pounds of high explosive. Its 
range is 18 kilometres, or a little over eleven 
miles, though this can probably be increased 
if desired. This is France's answer to the 
German 42's, and, just as the latter shattered 
the forts of Liege, Antwerp, and Namur, so 
these new French titans will, it is confidently 
believed, humble the pride of Metz and Stras- 
bourg. 

So insistent has been the demand from the 
front for big guns, and yet more big guns, 
that new batteries are being formed every day. 
Generally speaking, the French plan is to as- 
sign short-range howitzers and mortars to the 



154 ITALY AT WAR 

division; the longer range, horse-drawn guns 
— hippomobile the French designate them — to 
the army corps; while the tractor-drawn pieces 
and those mounted on railway-carriages are 
placed directly under the orders of the chief 
of artillery of each army. 

A new, and in many respects one of the most 
effective weapons produced by the war is the 
trench mortar. These light and mobile weap- 
ons, of which the French have at least four cali- 
bers, ranging from 58-millimetres to 340-milli- 
metres, are under the direction of the artillery, 
and should not be confused with the various 
types of bomb-throwers, which are operated by 
the infantry. The latest development in trench 
weapons is the Van Deuren mortar, which takes 
its name from the Belgian officer who is its 
inventor. Its chief peculiarity lies in the fact 
that its barrel consists of a solid core instead 
of a hollow tube like all other guns. Attached 
to the base of the shell is a hollow winged shaft 
which fits over the core of the gun, the desired 
range being obtained by varying the length of 
the powder-chamber: that is, the distance be- 
tween the end of the barrel and the base of 
the shell proper. The gun is fired at a fixed 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS !" 155 

elevation, and is so small and light that it can 
readily be moved and set up by a couple of 
men in a few minutes. In no branch of the 
artillery has such advancement been made as 
in the trench mortars, which have now attained 
almost as great a degree of accuracy as the 
field-gun. Such great importance is attached 
to the trench mortars by the Italians that they 
have formed them into a distinct arm of the 
service, entirely independent of the artillery, 
the officers of the trench-mortar batteries, who 
are drawn from the cavalry, being trained at 
a special school. 

The city of Verdun, or rather the blackened 
ruins which are all that remain of it, stands in 
the centre of a great valley which is shaped 
not unlike a platter. Down this valley, split- 
ting the city in half, meanders the River Meuse. 
The houses of Verdun, like those of so many 
mediaeval cities, are clustered about the foot 
of a great fortified rock. From this rock Vau- 
ban, at the order of Louis XIV, blasted ram- 
parts and battlements. To meet the constantly 
changing conditions of warfare, later genera- 
tions of engineers gradually honeycombed the 
rock with passages, tunnels, magazines, store- 



156 ITALY AT WAR 

rooms, halls, and casemates, a veritable laby- 
rinth of them, thus creating the present 
Citadel of Verdun. Then, because the city 
and its citadel lie in the middle of a valley 
dominated by hills — like a lump of sugar in 
the middle of a platter — upon those hills was 
built a chain of barrier forts: La Chaume, 
Tavannes, Thiaumont, Vaux, Douaumont, and 
others. But when, at Liege and Namur, at 
Antwerp and Maubeuge, the Germans proved 
conclusively that no forts could r-ng with- 
stand the battering of their heavy guns, the 
French took instant profit by the lesson. They 
promptly left the citadel and the forts nearest 
to it and established themselves in trenches 
on the surrounding hills, taking with them 
their artillery. This trench-line ran through 
certain of the small outlying forts, such as 
Tavannes, Thiaumont, Douaumont, and Vaux, 
and that is why you have read in the papers 
so much of the desperate fighting about them. 
Thus the much-talked-of fortress of Verdun 
was no longer a fortress at all, but merely a 
sector in that battle-line which extends from 
the Channel to the Alps. Barring its historic 
associations, and the moral effect which its 




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O 



Si 

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K 1^ 






"ojs 






"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 157 

fall might have in France and abroad, its 
capture by the Germans would have had no 
more strategic importance, if as much, than if 
the French line had been bent back for a few 
miles at Rheims, or Soissons, or Thann. The 
Vauban citadel in the city became merely an 
advanced headquarters, a telephone exchange, 
a supply station, a sort of central office, from 
the safety of whose subterranean casemates 
General Dubois, the commander of the city, 
directed the execution of the orders which he 
received from General Nivelle at Souilly, 
twenty miles away. Though the citadel's 
massive walls have resisted the terrific bom- 
bardments to which it has been subjected, it 
has neither guns nor garrison: they are far 
out on the trench-line beyond the encircling 
hills. It has, in fact, precisely the same rela- 
tion to the defense of the Verdun sector that 
Governor's Island has to the defense of New 
York. This it is important that you should 
keep in mind. It should also be remembered 
that Verdun was held not for strategic but for 
political and sentimental reasons. The French 
military chiefs, as soon as they learned of the 
impending German offensive, favored the evac- 



158 ITALY AT WAR 

uation of the city, whose defense, they argued, 
would necessitate the sacrifice of thousands of 
lives without any corresponding strategic bene- 
fit. But the heads of the Government in Paris 
looked at things from a different point of 
view. They realized that, no matter how 
negligible was its military value, the people 
of other countries, and, indeed, the French 
people themselves, believed that Verdun was 
a great fortress; they knew that its capture 
by the Germans would be interpreted by the 
world as a French disaster and that the morale 
of the French people, and French prestige 
abroad, would suffer accordingly. So, at the 
eleventh hour and fifty-ninth minute, when 
the preparations for evacuating the city were 
all but complete, imperative word was flashed 
from Paris that it must be held. And it was. 
Costly though the defense has been, the re- 
sult has justified it. The Crown Prince lost 
what little military reputation he possessed — 
if he had any to lose; his armies lost 600,000 
men in dead and wounded; and the world 
was shown that German guns and German bay- 
onets, no matter how overwhelming in number, 
cannot break down the steel walls of France. 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" i 59 

It was my great good fortune, when the 
fate of Verdun still hung in the balance, to 
visit the city and to lunch with General Dubois 
and his staff in the citadel. Though the valor 
of the French infantry kept the Germans from 
entering Verdun, nothing could prevent the 
entrance of their shells. Seven hundred fell 
in one day. Not a single house in a city of 
40,000 inhabitants remains intact: The place 
looks as though it had been visited simul- 
taneously by the San Francisco earthquake, 
the Baltimore fire, and the Johnstown flood. 
But once in the shelter of the citadel and we 
were safe. Though German shells of large 
caliber were falling in the city at frequent 
intervals, the casemate in which we lunched 
was so far beneath the surface of the earth 
that the sound of the explosions did not reach 
us. It was as though we were lunching in a 
New York subway station: a great, vaulted, 
white-tiled room aglare with electric lights. 
We sat with General Dubois and the members 
of his immediate staff at a small table close 
to the huge range on which the cooking was 
being done, while down the middle of the 
room stretched one of the longest tables I have 



160 ITALY AT WAR 

ever seen, at which upward of a hundred of- 
ficers — and one civilian — were eating. This 
lone civilian was a commissaire of police, and 
the sole representative of the city's civil pop- 
ulation. When the Tsar bestowed the Cross 
of St. George on the city in recognition of 
its heroic defense, it was to this policeman, 
the only civilian who remained, that the 
Russian representative handed the badge of 
the famous order. 

The dejeuner, though simple, was as well 
cooked and well served as though we were 
seated in a Paris restaurant instead of in a 
besieged fortress. And the first course was 
fresh lobster ! I told General Dubois that my 
friends at home would raise their eyebrows in- 
credulously when I told them this, whereupon 
he took a menu — for they had menus — and 
across it wrote his name and "Citadel de Ver- 
dun," and the date. "Perhaps that will con- 
vince them," he said, passing it to me. By 
this I do not mean to imply that the French 
commanders live in luxury. Far from it ! 
But, though their food is very simple, it is 
always well cooked (which is very far from 
being the case in our own army), and it is ap- 




.2 -5 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 161 

petizingly served whenever circumstances per- 
mit. 

After luncheon, under the guidance of the 
general, I made the rounds of the citadel. 
Here, so far beneath the earth as to be safe 
from even the largest shells, was the telephone- 
room, the nerve-centre of the whole compli- 
cated system of defense, with a switchboard 
larger than those in the "central office" of 
many an American city. By means of the 
thousands of wires focussed in that little un- 
derground room, General Dubois was enabled 
to learn in an instant what was transpiring 
at Douaumont or Tavannes or Vaux; he could 
pass on the information thus obtained to 
General Nivelle at Souilly; or he could talk 
direct to the Ministry of War, in Paris. I 
might add that one of the most difficult prob- 
lems met with in this war has been the main- 
tenance of communications during an attack. 
The telephone is the means most generally 
relied upon, but in spite of multiplying the 
number of lines, they are all usually put out 
of commission during the preliminary bom- 
bardment, the wires connecting the citadel 
with Fort Douaumont and Fort de Vaux, for 



i62 ITALY AT WAR 

example, being repeatedly destroyed. For this 
reason several alternative means of communi- 
cation have always to be provided, among 
these being flares and light-balls, carrier-pigeons, 
of which the French make considerable use, 
and optical signalling apparatus, this last 
method having been found the most effective. 
Sometimes small wireless outfits are used when 
the conditions permit. On a few occasions 
trained dogs have been used to send back mes- 
sages, but, the pictures in the illustrated papers 
to the contrary, they have not proven a suc- 
cess. In the final resort, the most ancient 
method of all — the despatch bearer or runner 
— has still very frequently to be employed, 
making his hazardous trips on a motor-cycle 
when he can, on foot when he must. 

In the room next to the telephone bureau 
a dozen clerks were at work and typewriters 
were clicking busily; had it not been for the 
uniforms one might have taken the place for 
the office of a large and busy corporation, as, 
in a manner of speaking, it was. On another 
level were the bakeries which supplied the 
bread for the troops in the trenches; enormous 
storerooms filled with supplies of every de- 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 163 

scription; an admirably equipped hospital 
with every cot occupied, usually by a "shrapnel 
case"; a flag-trimmed hall used by the officers 
as a club-room; and, on the upper levels, 
mess-halls and sleeping-quarters for the men. 
Despite the terrible strain of the long-con- 
tinued bombardment, the soldiers seemed sur- 
prisingly cheerful, going about their work in 
the long, gloomy passages joking and whistling. 
They sleep when and where they can: on the 
bunks in the fetid air of the casemates; on 
the steps of the steep staircases that burrow 
deep into the ground; or on the concrete 
floors of the innumerable galleries. But sleep- 
ing is not easy in Verdun. 

A short distance to the southwest of Verdun, 
on the bare face of a hill, is Fort de la Chaiime. 
Like the other fortifications built to defend 
the city, it no longer has any military value 
save for purposes of observation. Peering 
through a narrow slit in one of its armored 
observatoiresy I was able to view the whole 
field of the world's greatest battle — a battle 
which lasted a year and cost a million men — 
as from the gallery of a theatre one might 
look down upon the stage, the boxes, and the 



164 ITALY AT WAR 

orchestra-stalls. Below me, rising from the 
meadows beside the Meuse, were the shat- 
tered roofs and fire-blackened walls of Verdun, 
dominated by the stately tower of the cathe- 
dral and by the great bulk of the citadel. The 
environs of the town and the hill slopes be- 
yond the river were constantly pricked by 
sudden scarlet jets as the flame leaped from 
the mouths of the carefully concealed French 
guns, which seemed to be literally everywhere, 
while countless geyser-like irruptions of the 
earth, succeeded by drifting patches of white 
vapor, showed where the German shells were 
bursting. Sweeping the landscape with my 
field-glasses, a long column of motor-trucks 
laden with ammunition came within my field 
of vision. As I looked there suddenly ap- 
peared, squarely in the path of the foremost 
vehicle, a splotch of yellow smoke shot through 
with red. When the smoke and dust had 
cleared away, the motor-truck had disappeared. 
The artillery officer who accompanied me di- 
rected my gaze across the level valley to where, 
beyond the river, rose the great brown ridge 
known as the Heights of the Meuse. 

"Do you appreciate," he asked, "that on 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 165 

three miles of that ridge a million men — 400,- 
000 French and 600,000 Germans — have al- 
ready fallen ? " 

Beyond the ridge, but hidden by it, were 
Hill 304 and Le Mort Homme of bloody mem- 
ory, while on the horizon, looking like low, 
round-topped hillocks, were Forts Douaumont 
and de Vaux (what a thrill those names must 
give to every Frenchman !) and farther down 
the slope and a little nearer me were Fleury 
and Tavannes. The fountains of earth and 
smoke which leaped upward from each of them 
at the rate of half a dozen to the minute, showed 
us that they were enduring a particularly vi- 
cious hammering by the Germans. 

There are no words between the covers of 
the dictionary which can bring home to one 
who has not witnessed them the awful violence 
of the shell-storms which have desolated these 
hills about Verdun. In one week's attack to 
the north of the city the Germans threw five 
million shells, the total weight of which was 
forty-seven thousand tons. Eighty thousand 
shells rained upon one shallow sector of a thou- 
sand yards, and these were so marvellously 
placed that the crater of one cut into that of its 



166 ITALY AT WAR 

neighbor, pulverizing everything that lived and 
turning the man-filled trenches into tombs. 
Hence there is no longer any such thing as a 
continuous line of trenches. Indeed, there are 
no longer any trenches at all, nor entangle- 
ments either, but only a series of craters. It 
is these craters which the French infantry 
has held with such unparalleled heroism. The 
men holding the craters are kept supplied 
with food and ammunition from the chain of 
little forts — Vaux, Douaumont, and the others 
— and the forts, themselves battered almost 
to pieces by the torrents of steel which have 
been poured upon them, have relied in turn 
on the citadel back in Verdun for their rein- 
forcements, their ammunition, and their pro- 
visions, all of which have had to be sent out 
at night, the latter on the backs of men. 

So violent and long-continued have been 
the hurricanes of steel which have swept these 
slopes, that the surface of the earth has been 
literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous 
and incredibly tenacious quagmire in which 
horses and even soldiers have lost their lives. 
General Dubois told me that, only a few days 
before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff- 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 167 

officers, returning alone and afoot from an 
errand to Vaux, had fallen into a shell-crater 
and had drowned in the mud. Indeed, the 
whole terrain is pitted with shell-holes as is 
pitted the face of a man who has had the small- 
pox. So terrible is the condition of the coun- 
try that it often takes a soldier an hour to 
cover a mile. What was once a smiling and 
prosperous countryside has been rendered, by 
human agency, as barren and worthless as 
the slopes of Vesuvius. 

Verdun, I repeat, was held not by gun-power 
but by man-power. It was not the monster 
guns on railway-trucks, or even the great num- 
bers of quick-firing, hard-hitting 75's, but the 
magnificent courage and tenacity of the tired 
men in the mud-splashed uniforms, which held 
Verdun for France. Though their forts were 
crumbling under the violence of the German 
bombardment; though their trenches were 
pounded into pudding; though the unceasing 
barrage made it at times impossible to bring 
up food or water or reinforcements, the French 
hung stubbornly on, and against the granite 
wall of their defense the waves of men in gray 
flung themselves in vain. And when the fury 



168 ITALY AT WAR 

of the German assaults had in a measure spent 
itself, General Nivelle retook in a few hours, 
on October 24, 1916, Forts Douaumont and 
de Vaux, which had cost the Germans seven 
months of incessant efforts and a sacrifice of 
human lives unparalleled in history. 

The fighting before Verdun illustrated and 
emphasized the revolution in methods of at- 
tack and defense which has taken place in the 
French army. At the beginning of the war 
the French believed in depending largely on 
their light artillery both to prepare and to sup- 
port an attack, and for this purpose their 75*s 
were admirably adapted. This method worked 
well when carried out properly, and before the 
Germans had time to bring up their heavy 
guns; it was by resorting to it that the French 
won the victory of the Marne. But the Marne 
taught the Germans that the surest way to 
break up the French system of attack was to 
interpose obstacles, such as woods, wire en- 
tanglements, and particularly trenches. To de- 
stroy these obstacles the French then had to 
resort to heavy-calibered pieces, with which, as 
I have already remarked, they were at first 
very inadequately supplied. In the spring of 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 169 

191 5 in Artois, and in the autumn of the same 
year in Champagne, they attempted to break 
through the German lines, but these attacks 
were not supported by sufficient artillery and 
were each conducted in a single locality over a 
limited front. Then, at Verdun, the Germans 
tried opposite tactics, attempting to break 
through on a wide front extending on both 
sides of the Meuse. So appalling were their 
losses, however, that, as the attack progressed, 
they were compelled by lack of sufficient effec- 
tives to constantly narrow their front until 
finally the action was taking place along a line 
of only a few kilometres. This permitted the 
French to concentrate both their infantry and 
their artillery into dense formations, and before 
this concentrated and intensive fire the Ger- 
man attacking columns withered and were 
swept away like leaves before an autumn wind. 
The French infantry — and the same is, I 
believe, true of the German — is now to all in- 
tents and purposes divided into two classes: 
holding troops and attacking, or "shock" 
troops, as the French call them. The latter 
consist of such picked elements as the Chas- 
seur battalions, the Zouaves, the Colonials, the 



i 7 o ITALY AT WAR 

First, Twentieth, and Twenty-first Army Corps, 
and, of course, the Foreign Legion. All these 
are recruited from the youngest and most 
vigorous men, due regard being also paid to 
selecting recruits from those parts of France 
which have always produced the best fighting 
stock — and among these are the invaded dis- 
tricts. Shock troops are rarely sent into the 
trenches, but when not actively engaged in 
conducting or resisting an attack, are kept in 
cantonments well to the rear. Here they can 
get undisturbed rest at night, but by day they 
are worked as a negro teamster works his 
mule. As a result, they are always "on their 
toes," and in perfect fighting trim. In this 
way mobility, cohesion, and enthusiasm, all 
qualities which are seriously impaired by a 
long stay in the trenches, are preserved in the 
attacking troops, who, when they go into bat- 
tle, are as keen and hard and well-trained as a 
prize-fighter who steps into the ring to battle 
for the championship belt. 

The most striking feature of the new French 
system of attack is the team-work of the in- 
fantry, artillery, and airplanes. The former 
advance to the assault in successive waves, 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 171 

each made up of several lines, the men being 
deployed at five-yard intervals. The first 
wave advances at a slow walk behind a curtain 
of artillery fire, which moves forward at the 
rate of fifty yards a minute, the first line of the 
wave keeping a hundred to a hundred and fifty 
yards, or, in other words, at a safe distance, be- 
hind this protecting fire-curtain. The men in 
this first line carry no rifles, but consist ex- 
clusively of grenadiers, automatic riflemen, and 
their ammunition carriers, every eighth man 
being armed with the new Chauchat auto- 
matic rifle, a recently adopted weapon which 
weighs only nineteen pounds, and fires at the 
rate of five shots a second. Three men, carry- 
ing between them one thousand cartridges, are 
assigned to each of these guns, of which there 
are now more than fifty thousand in use on 
the French front. The automatic riflemen fire 
from the hip as they advance, keeping streams 
of bullets playing on the enemy just as firemen 
keep streams of water playing on a fire. In 
the second line the men are armed with rifles, 
some having bayonets and others rifle grenades, 
the latter being specially designed to break 
up counter-attacks against captured trenches. 



172 ITALY AT WAR 

A third line follows, consisting of "trench 
cleaners," though it must not be inferred from 
their name that they use mops and brooms. 
The native African troops are generally used 
for this trench -cleaning business, and they 
do it very handily with grenades, pistols, and 
knives. 

When the first wave reaches a point within 
two hundred to three hundred yards of the 
enemy's trenches, a halt of five minutes is 
made to reform for the final charge. In ad- 
dition to the advancing curtain-fire imme- 
diately preceding the troops, a second screen 
of fire is dropped between the enemy's first and 
second lines, thus preventing the men in the 
first line from retreating and making it equally 
impossible for the men in the second line to 
get reinforcements or supplies to their com- 
rades in the first. Still other batteries are en- 
gaged in keeping down the fire of the hostile 
artillery while the big guns, mounted on rail- 
way-trucks, shell the enemy's headquarters, 
his supports, and his lines of communication. 

The attack is accompanied by and largely 
directed by airplanes, certain of which are as- 
signed to regulating the artillery fire, while 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 173 

others devote themselves exclusively to giving 
information to the infantry, with whom they 
communicate by means of dropping from one 
to six fire-balls. As the aircraft used for in- 
fantry and artillery regulation are compara- 
tively slow machines, they are protected from 
the attacks of enemy aviators by a screen of 
small, fast battle-planes — the destroyers of the 
air — which, in several cases, have swooped low 
enough to use their machine-guns on the Ger- 
man trenches. If it becomes necessary to give 
to the infantry some special information not 
provided for by the prearranged signals, the 
aviator will volplane down to within a hundred 
feet above the infantry and drop a written mes- 
sage. I was told that in one of the successful 
French attacks before Verdun such a message 
proved extremely useful as by means of it the 
troops advancing toward Douaumont, which 
was then held by the Germans, were informed 
that the enemy was in force on their right, but 
that there was practically no resistance on 
their left. Acting in response to this informa- 
tion from the skies, they swung forward on 
this flank, and took the Germans on their 
right in the rear. Just as a football team is 



174 ITALY AT WAR 

coached from the side-lines, so a charge is 
nowadays directed from the clouds. 

One of the picturesque developments of the 
war is camouflage, as the French call their system 
of disguising or concealing batteries, airplane- 
sheds, ammunition stores, and the like, from 
observation and possible destruction by enemy 
aviators. This work is done in the main by a 
corps specially recruited for the purpose from 
the artists and scene painters of France. It is 
considered prudent, for example, to conceal the 
location of a certain "ammunition dump," as 
the British term the vast accumulations of 
shells, cartridges, and other supplies which are 
piled up at the rail-heads awaiting transporta- 
tion to the front by motor-lorry. Over the 
great mound of shells and cartridge-boxes is 
spread an enormous piece of canvas, often 
larger by far than the "big top" of a four-ring 
circus. Then the scene painters get to work 
with their paints and brushes and transform 
that expanse of canvas into what, when viewed 
from the sky, appears to be, let us say, a group 
of innocent farm-buildings. The next day, 
perhaps, a German airman, circling high over- 
head, peers earthward through his glasses and 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 175 

descries, far beneath him, a cluster of red 
rectangles — the tiled roofs of cottages or stables, 
he supposes; a patch of green — evidently a 
bit of lawn; a square of gray — the cobble- 
paved barnyard — and pays it no further at- 
tention. How can he know that what he takes 
to be a farmstead is but a piece of painted 
canvas concealing a small mountain of poten- 
tial death ? 

At a certain very important point on the 
French front there long stood, in an exposed 
and commanding position, a large and solitary 
tree, or rather the trunk of a tree, for it had been 
shorn of its branches by shell-fire. A land- 
mark in that flat and devastated region, every 
detail of this gaunt sentinel had long since be- 
come familiar to the keen-eyed observers, in 
the German trenches, a few hundred yards 
away. Were a man to climb to its top — and 
live — he would be able to command a com- 
prehensive view of the surrounding terrain. 
The German sharpshooters saw to it, however, 
that no one climbed it. But one day the re- 
sourceful French took the measurements of 
that tree and photographed it. These measure- 
ments and photographs were sent to Paris. 



176 ITALY AT WAR 

A fev weeks later there arrived at the French 
front by railway an imitation tree, made of 
steel, which was an exact duplicate in every 
respect, even to the splintered branches and 
the bark, of the original. Under cover of 
darkness the real tree was cut down and the 
fake tree erected in its place, so that, when 
daylight came, there was no change in the 
landscape to arouse the Germans' suspicions. 
The lone tree-trunk to which they had grown 
so accustomed still reared itself skyward. But 
the "tree" at which the Germans were now 
looking was of hollow steel, and concealed in 
its interior in a sort of conning-tower, forty 
feet above the ground, a French observing 
officer, field-glasses at his eyes and a telephone 
at his lips, was peering through a cleverly con- 
cealed peep-hole, spotting the bursts of the 
French shells and regulating the fire of the 
French batteries. 

Nearly three years have passed since Ger- 
many tore up the Scrap of Paper. In that 
time the French army has been hammered and 
tempered and tested until it has become the 
most formidable weapon of offense and defense 




£ m 



"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!" 177 

in existence. I am convinced that in or- 
ganization and in efficiency it is now, after 
close on three years of experiments and 
object-lessons, as good, if not better, than 
the German — and I have marched with both 
and have seen both in action. Its light ar- 
tillery is admittedly the finest in the world. 
Though without any heavy artillery to speak 
of at the beginning of the war, it has in this 
respect already equalled if not surpassed the 
Germans. It has created an air service which, 
in efficiency and in number of machines, is 
unequalled. And the men, themselves, in addi- 
tion to their characteristic elan, possess that 
invaluable quality which the German soldier 
lacks — initiative. 

It is worthy of note, in this connection, that 
the entire reorganization of the French army 
has been carried out virtually without any ac- 
tion on the part of the French Congress, and 
with merely the formal approval of the Minister 
of War. The politicians in Paris have, save in 
a few instances, wisely refrained from inter- 
ference, and have left military problems to be 
decided by military men. But, when all is 
said and done, it will not be the generals who 



178 ITALY AT WAR 

will decide this war; it will be the soldiers. 
And they are truly wonderful men, these 
French soldiers. It is their amazing calm, their 
total freedom from nervousness or apprehen- 
sion, that impresses one the most, and the 
secret of this calm is confidence. They are as 
confident of eventual victory as they are that 
the sun will rise to-morrow morning. They 
are fanatics, and France is their Allah. You 
can't beat men like that, because they never 
know when they are beaten, and keep on 
fighting. 

I like to think that sometimes, in that cold 
and dismal hour before the dawn, when hope 
and courage are at their lowest ebb, there ap- 
pears among the worn and homesick soldiers 
in the trenches the spirit of the Great Emperor. 
Cheeringly he claps each man upon the shoulder. 

"Courage, mon brave," he whispers. "On 
les aura !" 



VII 

"THAT CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE 
ARMY" 

IN watching the operations on the British 
front I have always had the feeling that I 
was witnessing a gigantic engineering un- 
dertaking. The amazing network of rails which 
the British have thrown over Northern France, 
the endless strings of lorries, the warehouses 
bulging with supplies, the cranes and derricks, 
the repair depots, the machine-shops, the tens 
of thousands of men whose only weapons are 
the shovel and the pick, all help to further this 
impression. And, when you stop to think about 
it, it is an engineering undertaking. These 
muddy men in khaki are engaged in checking 
and draining off an unclean flood which, were 
it not for them, would soon inundate all Eu- 
rope. And so, because I love things that are 
clean and green and beautiful, I am very 
grateful to them for their work of sanitation. 
179 



180 ITALY AT WAR 

Because most of the despatches from the 
British front have related to trenches and tanks 
and howitzers and flying men and raiding- 
parties, the attention of the American people 
has been diverted from the remarkable and 
tremendously important work which is being 
played by the army behind the army. Yet 
one of the most splendid achievements of the 
entire war is the creation of the great organiza- 
tion which links the British trenches with the 
British Isles. In failing to take into account 
the Anglo-Saxon's genius for rapid organiza- 
tion and improvization in emergencies, Ger- 
many made a fatal error. She had spent up- 
ward of forty years in perfecting her war ma- 
chine; the British have built a better one in 
less than three. I said in "Vive la France!" 
if I remember rightly, that the British ma- 
chine, though still somewhat wabbly and creaky 
in its joints, was, I believed, eventually going 
to do the business for which it was designed. 
That was a year ago. It has already shown in 
unmistakable fashion that it can do the busi- 
ness and do it well, and it is, moreover, just 
entering on the period of its greatest efficiency. 

In order to understand the workings and the 




fn ■§ 



h 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 181 

ramifications of this great machine in France 
(its work in England is another story) you must 
begin your study of it at the base camps which 
the British have established at Calais, Havre, 
Boulogne, and Rouen, and the training-schools 
at Etaples and elsewhere. Let us take, for 
example, "Cinder City," as the base camp 
outside Calais is called because the ground 
on which it stands was made by dumping ships' 
cinders into a marsh. It is in many respects 
one of the most remarkable cities in the world. 
Its population, which fluctuates with the tide 
of war, averages, I suppose, about one hundred 
thousand. It has many miles of macadamized 
streets (as sandy locations are chosen for these 
base camps, mud is almost unknown) lined 
with storehouses — one of them the largest in 
the world — with stores, with machine-shops, 
churches, restaurants, club-rooms, libraries, 
Y. M. C. A.'s — there are over a thousand of 
them in the war zone — Salvation Army bar- 
racks, schools, bathing establishments, theatres, 
motion-picture houses, hospitals for men and 
hospitals for horses, and thousands upon thou- 
sands of portable wooden huts. This city is 
lighted by electricity, it has highly efficient 



i82 ITALY AT WAR 

police, fire, and street-cleaning departments, 
and its water and sewage systems would make 
jealous many municipalities of twice its size. 
Among its novel features is a school for army 
bakers and another for army cooks, for good 
food has almost as much to do with winning 
battles as good ammunition. But most sig- 
nificant and important of all are the "economy 
shops" where are repaired or manufactured 
practically everything required by an army. 
War, as the British have found, is a stagger- 
ingly expensive business, and, in order that 
there may be a minimum of wastage, they have 
organized a Salvage Corps whose business it is 
to sort the litter of the battle-fields and to send 
everything that can by any possibility be re- 
utilized to the "economy shops" at the rear. 
In one of these shops I saw upward of a thou- 
sand French and Belgian women renovating 
clothing that had come back from the front, 
uniforms which arrived as bundles of muddy, 
bloody rags being fumigated and cleaned and 
mended and pressed until they were almost as 
good as new. Tens of thousands of boots are 
sent in to be repaired; those that can stand the 
operation are 5 soled and heeled by American 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 183 

machines brought over for the purpose, and 
even the others are not wasted, for their tops 
are converted into boot-laces. In one shop the 
worn-out tubes and springs of guns are replaced 
with new ones. (Did you know that during an 
intense bombardment the springs of the guns 
will last only two days ?) In another fragments 
of valuable metal sent in from the battle-field 
are melted and reused. (Perhaps you were 
not aware that a 5-inch shell carries a copper 
band weighing a pound and a quarter. The 
weight of copper shot off in this way during a 
single brief bombardment was four hundred 
tons.) The millions of empty shells which 
litter the ground behind the batteries are 
cleaned and classified and shipped over to 
England to be reloaded. Steel rails which the 
retreating Germans believed they had made 
quite useless are here straightened out and 
used over again. Shattered rifles, bits of har- 
ness, haversacks, machine-gun belts, trench 
helmets, sand-bags, barbed wire — nothing es- 
capes the Salvage Corps. They even collect 
and send in old rags, which are sold for two 
hundred and fifty dollars a ton. Let us talk 
less hereafter of German efficiency. 



i8 4 ITALY AT WAR 

Even more significant than the base camps of 
the efficiency and painstaking thoroughness of 
the British war-machine are the training camps 
scattered behind the lines. Typical of these is 
the great camp at Etaples, on the French coast, 
where 150,000 men can be trained at a time. 
These are not schools for raw recruits, mind 
you — that work is done in England — but 
"finishing schools," as it were, where men who 
are supposed to have already learned the busi- 
ness of war are given final examinations in the 
various subjects in which they have received 
instruction before being sent up to the front. 
And the soldier who is unable to pass these 
final tests does not go to the front until he can. 
The camp at Etaples, which is built on a stretch 
of rolling sand beside the sea, is five miles long 
and a mile wide, and on every acre of it there 
are squads of soldiers drilling, drilling, drilling. 
Here a gymnastic instructor from Sandhurst, 
lithe and active as a panther, is teaching a 
class of sergeants drawn from many regiments 
how to become instructors themselves. His 
language would have amazed and delighted 
Kipling's Ortheris and Mulvaney; I could 
have listened to him all day. Over there 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 185 

a platoon of Highlanders are practising the tak- 
ing of German trenches. At the blast of a 
whistle they clamber out of a length of trench 
built for the purpose, and, with shrill Gaelic 
yells, go swarming across a stretch of broken 
ground, through a tangle of twisted wire, and 
over the top of the German parapet, where- 
upon a row of German soldiers, stuffed with 
straw and automatically controlled, spring up 
to meet them. If a man fails to bury his bay- 
onet in the "German" who opposes him, he 
is sent back to the awkward squad and spends 
a few days lunging at a dummy swung from 
a beam. 

Crater fighting is taught in an ingenious re- 
production of a crater, by an officer who has 
had much experience with the real thing and 
who explains to his pupils, whose knowledge of 
craters has been gained from the pictures in 
the illustrated weeklies, how to capture, fortify, 
and hold such a position. In order to give the 
men confidence when the order "Put on gas- 
masks!" is passed down the line, they are 
sent into a real dugout filled with real gas and 
the entrances closed behind them. As soon as 
they find that the masks are a sure protection, 



1 86 ITALY AT WAR 

their nervousness disappears. In order to ac- 
custom them to lachrymal shells, they are 
marched, this time without masks, through 
an underground chamber which reeks with 
the tear-producing gas — and they are a very 
weepy, red-eyed lot of men who emerge. They 
are instructed in trench-digging, in the con- 
struction of wire entanglements, "knife-rests," 
chevaux-de-frise, and every other form of ob- 
struction, in revetting, in the making of fascines 
and gabions, in sapping and mining, in the 
most approved methods of dugout construction, 
in trench sanitation, in the location of listening- 
posts and how to conceal them; they are shown 
how to cut wire, they are drilled in trench 
raiding and in the most effective methods of 
"trench cleaning." The practical work is sup- 
plemented by lectures on innumerable subjects. 
As it is extremely difficult for an officer to make 
his explanations heard by a battalion of men 
assembled in the open, a series of small amphi- 
theatres have been excavated from the sand- 
dunes, the tiers of seats being built up of petrol 
tins filled with sand. In one of these impro- 
vised amphitheatres I saw an officer illustrat- 
ing the proper method of using the gas-mask 
to a class of 600 men. 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 187 

On these imitation battle-fields, any one of 
which is larger than the field of Waterloo, the 
men are instructed in the gentle art of bombing, 
first with "dubs," which do not explode at all, 
then with toy-grenades which go off" harmlessly 
with a noise like a small fire-cracker, and finally, 
when they have become sufficiently expert, 
with the real Mills bomb, which scatters de- 
struction in a burst of noise and flame. To at- 
tain accuracy and distance in throwing these 
destructive little ovals is by no means as easy 
as it sounds. The bombing-school at Etaples 
will not soon forget the American baseball 
player who threw a bomb seventy yards. The 
hand-grenade is the unsafest and most treach- 
erous of all weapons and even in practice ac- 
cidents and near-accidents frequently occur. 
The Mills bomb, which has a scored surface to 
prevent slipping, is about the shape and size of 
a large lemon. Protruding from one end is the 
small metal ring of the firing-pin. Three sec- 
onds after this is pulled out the bomb explodes 
— and the farther the thrower can remove him- 
self from the bomb in that time the better. 
Now, in line with the policy of strict economy 
which has been adopted by the British military 



1 88 ITALY AT WAR 

authorities, the men receiving instruction at 
the bombing-schools were told not to throw 
away the firing-pins, but to put them in their 
pockets, to be turned in and used over again. 
The day after this order went into effect a 
company of newly arrived recruits were being 
put through their bomb-throwing tests. Man 
after man walked up to the protecting earth- 
work, jerked loose the firing-pin, hurled the 
bomb, and put the firing-pin in his pocket. At 
last it came the turn of a youngster who was 
obviously overcome with stage fright. To the 
horror of his comrades, he threw the firing-pin 
and put the live bomb in his pocket ! In three 
seconds that bomb was due to explode, but the 
instructor, who had seen what had happened, 
made a flying leap to the befuddled man, thrust 
his hand into his pocket, drew out the bomb, 
and hurled it. It exploded in the air. 

Near Etaples, at Paris Plage, is the largest 
of the British machine-gun schools. Here the 
men are taught the operation not only of all 
the models of machine-guns used by the Allies, 
but they are also shown how to handle any 
which they may capture from the Germans. 
Set up on the beach were a dozen different 




u. 2 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 189 

models, beginning with a wonderfully in- 
genious weapon, as beautifully constructed as 
a watch, which had just been brought in from 
a captured German airplane and of which the 
British officers were loud in their admiration, 
and ending with the little twenty-five-pound 
gun invented by Colonel Lewis, an American. 
Standing on the sands, a few hundred yards 
away, were half a dozen targets of the size and 
outline of German soldiers. "Try 'em out," 
suggested the officer in command of the school. 
So I seated myself behind the German gun, 
looked into a ground-glass finder like that on a 
newspaper photographer's camera, swung the 
barrel of the weapon until the intersection of 
the scarlet cross-hairs covered the mirrored 
reflection of the distant figures, and pressed 
together a pair of handles. There was a noise 
such as a small boy makes when he draws a 
stick along the palings of a picket fence, a 
series of flame-jets leaped from the muzzle of 
the gun, and the targets disappeared. "You'd 
have broken up that charge," commented the 
officer approvingly. "Try the others." So I 
tried them all — Maxim, Hotchkiss, Colt, St. 
Etienne, Lewis — in turn. 



i 9 o ITALY AT WAR 

"Which do you consider the best gun?" I 
asked. 

"That one," and he pointed to Colonel 
Lewis's invention. "It is the lightest, sim- 
plest, strongest, and most effective machine- 
gun made. It weighs only twenty-five and a 
half pounds and a clip of forty-seven rounds 
can be fired in four seconds. At present we 
have four to each company — though the num- 
ber will probably be increased shortly — and 
they are so easy to handle that in an attack 
they go over with the second wave." 

"But our Ordnance Department claims that 
they cannot fire two thousand rounds without 
heating and jamming," I remarked. 

"Who ever heard of a machine-gun being 
called upon to fire two thousand rounds under 
actual service conditions?" he asked scorn- 
fully. "On the front we rarely exceed two 
hundred or three hundred rounds; five hundred 
never. Long before that number can be fired 
the attack is broken up or the gun is captured." 

"In any event," said I, "the American War 
Department, to whom Colonel Lewis offered 
his patents, asserts that the gun did not make 
good on the proving-grounds at Indian Head." 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 191 

"Well," was the dry response, "it has made 
good on the proving-grounds of Flanders." 

The pretty little casino at Paris Plage, where, 
in the days before the war, the members of the 
summer colony used to dance or play at petits 
chevaux, has been converted into a lecture-hall 
for machine-gunners. Covering the walls are 
charts and cleverly painted pictures which il- 
lustrate at a glance the important roles played 
by machine-guns in certain actions. They re- 
minded me of those charts which they use in 
Sunday-schools to explain the flight of the Is- 
raelites out of Egypt or their wanderings in the 
Wilderness. Seated on the wooden benches, 
which have been brought in from a school near 
by, are a score or more of sun-reddened young 
Englishmen in khaki, 

"Here," says the alert young officer who is 
acting as instructor, unrolling a chart, "is a 
picture of an action in a little village south of 
Mons. A company of our fellows were holding 
the village. There are, you see, only two roads 
by which the Germans could advance, so the 
captain who was in command placed machine- 
guns so as to command each of them. About 
five o'clock in the morning the Germans ap- 



i 9 2 ITALY AT WAR 

peared on this lower road. Now, the sergeant 
in charge of that machine-gun, instead of tak- 
ing cover behind this hedge with this brook in 
front of him, had concealed his gun in this 
clump of trees, which, as you see, are out in 
the middle of a field. No sooner had he opened 
upon the Boches, therefore, than a detachment 
of Uhlans galloped around and cut him off 
from the town. Then it was all over but the 
shouting. The Germans got into the town and 
our fellows got it in the neck. And all because 
that fool sergeant didn't use common sense in 
choosing a position for his gun. They marked 
his grave with a nice little white cross. And 
that's what you boys will get if you don't profit 
by these things I'm telling you." 

There you have an example of the thorough 
preparation which is necessary to wage modern 
war successfully. It is not merely a matter of 
a man being taught how to operate a machine- 
gun; if he is to be of the greatest value he must 
be taught how to place that gun where it is 
going to do the maximum damage to the enemy. 
And, by means of the graphic Sunday-school 
charts, and the still more graphic sentences of 
the officer-teacher, those lessons are so driven 
home that the men will never forget them. 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 193 

Virtually everything between England and 
the fighting front is under the control of the 
L. C. — Lines of Communication. This vast or- 
ganization, one of the most wide-spread and 
complex in the world, represents six per cent of 
all the British forces in France. Of the count- 
less forms of activity which it comprises, the 
railways are by far the most important. Did 
you know that the British have laid and are 
operating more than a thousand miles of new 
railway in France? As the existing railways 
were wholly inadequate for the transportation 
of the millions of fighting men, with the stupen- 
dous quantities of food and equipment, new 
networks of steel had to be laid, single tracks 
had to be converted into double ones, mam- 
moth railway-yards, sidings, and freight-houses 
had to be built, thousands of locomotives, car- 
riages, and trucks provided. This work was 
done by the Railway Companies of the Royal 
Engineers, behind which was the Railway Re- 
serve, whose members, before the war, were 
employed by the great English railway sys- 
tems. Wearing the blue-and-white brassard 
of the L. C. are whole battalions of engineers 
and firemen, bridge-builders, signalmen, freight 
handlers, clerks, and navvies, all of them ex- 



i 9 4 ITALY AT WAR 

perts at their particular jobs. It is impossible 
to overrate the services which these railway 
men have performed. They build and staff 
the new lines which are constantly being con- 
structed; they repair destroyed sections of 
track, restore blown-up bridges; in short, keep 
in order the arteries through which courses the 
life-blood of the army. They are the real or- 
ganizers of victory. Without them the men in 
the trenches could not fight a day. You cannot 
travel for a mile along the British front without 
seeing an example of their rapid track-laying. 
They have had to forget all the old-fashioned 
British notions about track permanency, how- 
ever, for their business is to get the trains over 
the rails with the least possible delay; nothing 
else matters. Engaged in this work are men 
who have learned the lessons of rough-and- 
ready construction on the Mexican Central, 
on the Egyptian State Railways, on the Beira 
and Mashonaland, and on the Canadian Pacific, 
and the rate at which they cause the twin 
lines of steel to grow before one's eyes would 
have aroused the admiration of such railroad 
pioneers as Stanford and Hill and Harriman. 
The engines for use on these military rail- 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 195 

ways are sent across the Channel with fires 
already built and banked, water in the boilers, 
and coal in the tenders. They come in ships 
specially constructed so that the whole top 
deck can be lifted off. Giant cranes reach 
down into the hold and pick the engines up 
and set them down on the tracks on the quays, 
the crews climb aboard and shake down the 
fires, a harassed-looking man, known as the 
M. L. 0. (Military Landing Officer) turns 
them over to the Railway Transport Officer, 
who is a very important personage indeed, and 
he in turn hands the engineers their orders, 
and, half an hour after they have been landed 
on the soil of France, the engines go puffing 
off to take their places in the war machine. 

It is not the numbers of men to be trans- 
ported to the front, nor even the astounding 
quantities of supplies required to feed those 
men, which have been the primary cause for 
crisscrossing all Northern France with this 
latticework of steel. It is the unappeasable 
appetite of the guns. "This is a cannon war," 
Field-Marshal von Mackensen told an inter- 
viewer. "The side that burns up the most 
ammunition is bound to gain ground." And 



196 ITALY AT WAR 

on that assumption the British are proceeding. 
England's response to the insistent cry of 
"Shells, shells, shells!" has been one of the 
wonders of the war. By January i, 1917, the 
shell increase for howitzers was twenty-seven 
times greater than in 1914-15; in mid-caliber 
shells the increase was thirty-four times; and 
in all the "heavies" ninety-four times. And 
the shell output keeps a-growing and a-growing. 
Yet what avail the four thousand flaming forges 
which have made all this possible, what avails 
the British sea-power which has landed these 
amazing quantities of shells in France, and 
2,000,000 of men along with them, if the 
shells cannot be delivered to the guns ? And 
that is where the great new systems of railway 
have come in. 

" Be lavish with your ammunition," Napoleon 
urged upon his battery commanders. "Fire in- 
cessantly." And it is that maxim which the 
artillerists of all the nations at war are follow- 
ing to-day. The expenditure of shells staggers 
the imagination. In a single day, near Arras, 
the French let loose upon the German lines 
$1,625,000 worth of projectiles, or almost as 
great a quantity as Germany used in the entire 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 197 

war of 1870-71. Five million shells of all 
calibers were fired by the British gunners dur- 
ing the first four weeks of the offensive on the 
Somme. In one week's attack north of Ver- 
dun the Germans fired 2,400,000 field-gun shells 
and 600,000 larger ones. To transport this 
mountain of potential destruction required 
240 trains, each carrying 200 tons of projec- 
tiles. 

During the " Big Push" on the Somme, there 
were frequently eighty guns on a front of two 
hundred yards. The batteries would fire a 
round per gun per minute for days on end, the 
gunners working in shifts, two hours on and 
two hours off. So thickly did the shells fall 
upon the German lines that the British observ- 
ing officers were frequently unable to spot their 
own bursts. A field-battery of eighteen- 
pounders firing at this rate will blaze away 
anywhere from twelve to twenty tons of am- 
munition a day. As guns firing with such 
rapidity wear out their tubes and their springs 
in a few days, it is necessary to rush entire 
batteries to the repair-shops at the rear. And 
that provides another burden for the railways. 

In addition to the railways of standard 



i 9 8 ITALY AT WAR 

gauge, the British have laid down an astonish- 
ing trackage of narrow-gauge, Decauville, and 
monorail systems. These portable and easily 
laid field railways twist and turn and coil like 
snakes among the gun positions, the miniature 
engines, with their strings of toy cars, puff- 
ing their way into the heart of the artillery 
zone, where the ammunition is unloaded, 
sorted, and classified in calibers, and then art- 
fully hidden from the prying eyes of enemy 
aviators and from their bombs. These great 
collections of gun-food the English inelegantly 
term " ammunition dumps." Nor do the trains 
that come up loaded go back empty, for upon 
the miniature trucks are loaked the combings 
of the battle-field to be shipped back to the 
"economy shops" in the rear. Where possible, 
wounded men are sent back to the hospitals in 
like fashion, some of the railways having trucks 
specially constructed for this purpose. Where 
the light railways stop the monorail systems 
begin, food, cartridges, and mail being sent 
right up into the forward trenches in small cars 
or baskets suspended from a single overhead 
rail and pushed by hand. They look not un- 
like the old-fashioned cash-and-parcel carriers 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 199 

which were used in American department 
stores before the present system of pneumatic 
tubes came in. 

Comprising another branch of the L. C.'s 
multifarious activities are the field telephones, 
whose lines of black-and-white poles run out 
across the landscape in every direction. And 
it is no haphazard and hastily improvised sys- 
tem either, but as good in every respect as you 
will find in American cities. It has to be 
good. Too much depends upon it. An indis- 
tinct message might cost a thousand lives; a 
breakdown in the system might mean a great 
military disaster. Every officer of importance 
in the British zone has a telephone at hand, and 
as the armies advance the telephones go with 
them, the wires and portable instruments being 
transported by the motor-cycle despatch riders 
of the Army Signal Corps, so that frequently 
within thirty minutes after a battalion has 
captured a German position its commander 
will be in telephonic communication with Ad- 
vanced G. H. Q. The speed with which the 
connections are made would be remarkable 
even in New York. I have seen an officer at 
General Headquarters establish communica- 



2oo ITALY AT WAR 

tion with the Provost Marshal's office in Paris 
in three minutes, and with the War Office in 
London in ten. 

I might mention in passing that nowadays 
the General Headquarters of an army (G. 
H. Q. it is always called on the British front, 
Grand Quartier-General on the French? and 
Comando Supremo on the Italian) is usually 
eight, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty-five miles 
behind the firing-line. Most of the com- 
manding generals have, however, advanced 
headquarters, considerably nearer the front, 
where they usually remain during important 
actions. It is said that at Waterloo Napoleon 
and Wellington watched each other through 
their telescopes. Compare this with the battle 
for Verdun, where the headquarters of the 
Crown Prince must have been at least thirty 
miles from those of General Nivelle at Souilly. 

If one of the greatest triumphs of the war is 
the creation of the transport system, another 
is the maintenance, often under heavy shell- 
fire, of the highways on which that transport 
moves. No one can imagine what the traffic 
from the Channel up to the British front is 
like; one must see it to believe it. The roads 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 201 

are as crowded with traffic as is Fifth Avenue 
on a sunny afternoon. Every fifty yards or 
so are military police, mounted and afoot, 
who control the traffic with small red flags 
as do the New York bluecoats with their stop- 
and-go signs. So incredibly dense was the 
volume of traffic during the Somme offensive 
that it is little exaggeration to say that an ac- 
tive man could have started immediately back 
of the British front and could have made his 
way to Albert, twenty miles distant, if not, in- 
deed, to the English Channel, by jumping from 
lorry to wagon, from wagon to ambulance, from 
ambulance to motor-bus. In going from Al- 
bert up to the front I passed hundreds, yes, 
thousands of lumbering motor-lorries bearing 
every kind of supply from barbed wire to mar- 
malade. In order to avoid confusion, the lor- 
ries belonging to the ammunition-train have 
painted on their sides a shell, while those com- 
prising the supply column are designated by a 
four-leaf clover. A whole series of other dis- 
tinctive emblems, such as stars, crescents, 
pyramids, Maltese crosses, unicorns, make it 
possible to tell at a glance to what division or 
unit a vehicle belongs. I passed six-mule 



202 ITALY AT WAR 

teams from Missouri and Mississippi hauling 
wagons made in South Bend, Indiana, which 
were piled high with sides of Australian beef 
and loaves of French-made bread. Converted 
motor-buses, which had once borne the signs 
Bank-Holborn-Marble Arch, rumbled past with 
their loads of boisterous men in khaki bound 
for the trenches or bringing back other loads 
of tired men clad apparently in nothing save 
mud. Endless strings of ambulances went 
rocking and rolling by and some of them were 
dripping crimson. Tractors, big as elephants, 
panted and grunted on their way, hauling long 
trains of wagons laden with tins of cocoa or 
condensed milk, with kegs of nails, with lumber, 
with fodder. Occasionally a gray stafF-car 
like our own threaded its tortuous and halt- 
ing way through the terrific press of traffic. 
We passed one that had broken down. The 
two officers who were its occupants were seated 
on the muddy bank beside the road smoking 
cigarettes while the driver was endeavoring to 
get his motor started again. One of them, on 
the shoulder-straps of whose "British warm" 
were the stars of a captain, was a slender, fair- 
haired, rather delicate-looking youngster in 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 203 

the early twenties. It was the Prince of Wales, 
but, so far as receiving any attention from the 
hurrying throng was concerned, he might as 
well have been an unknown subaltern. For 
it is an extremely democratic army, and royalty 
receives from it scant consideration; Lloyd 
George is of far more importance than King 
George to the man in khaki. 

Almost since the beginning of the war this 
particular stretch of road on which I was travel- 
ling had been shelled persistently, as was 
shown by the splintered tree-stumps which 
lined the road and the shell-craters which pitted 
the fields on either side. To keep this road 
passable under such wear and tear as it had 
been subjected to for many months would have 
been a remarkable accomplishment under any 
circumstances; to keep it open under heavy 
shell-fire is a performance for which the labor 
battalions deserve the highest praise. Wearing 
their steel helmets, the road-making gangs 
have kept at work, night and day, along its 
entire length, exposed to much of the danger 
of the men in the trenches, and having none 
of their protection. There has been no time to 
obtain ordinary road metal, so they have filled 



20 4 ITALY AT WAR 

up the holes with bricks taken from the ruined 
villages which dot the landscape, rolling them 
level when they get the chance. For nothing 
must be permitted to interfere with that flow 
of traffic; on it depends the food for the men 
and for the guns. An hour's blockade on that 
road would prove infinitely more serious than 
would a freight wreck which blocked all four 
tracks of the New York Central. No wonder 
that Lord Derby, in addressing his Pioneer 
Battalions in Lancashire, remarked: "In this 
war the pick and the shovel are as important 
as the rifle." 

While I was standing on the summit of a 
little eminence beyond Fricourt, looking down 
on that amazing scene of industry, a big Ger- 
man shell burst squarely on the road. It 
wrecked a motor-lorry, it killed several horses 
and half a dozen men, but, most serious of all, 
it blew in the road a hole as large as a cottage 
cellar. The river of traffic may have halted for 
two or three minutes, certainly not more. In 
scarcely more time than it takes to tell it, the 
nearest military police were on the spot. The 
stream of vehicles bound for the front was swung 
out into the fields at the right, the stream headed 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 205 

for the rear was diverted into the fields at the 
left. Within five minutes a hundred men were 
at work with pick and shovel filling up the hole 
with material piled at frequent intervals along 
the road for just that purpose. Within twenty 
minutes a steam-roller had arrived — goodness 
knows where it had materialized from ! — and 
was at work rolling the road into hardness. 
Within thirty minutes after the shell burst the 
hole which it made no longer existed and the 
lorries, the tractors, the wagons, the guns, the 
buses, the ambulances were rolling on their 
way. Then they bore away the six tarpaulin- 
covered forms beside the road and buried 
them. 

The weather is a vital factor in war. The 
heavy rains of a French winter quickly trans- 
form the ground, already churned up by months 
of shell-fire, into a slimy, glutinous swamp, 
incredibly tenacious and unbelievably deep. 
Through this vast stretch of mud, pitted every- 
where with shell-holes filled with stagnant 
water, the infantry has to make its way and 
the guns have to be moved forward to support 
the infantry. On one stretch of road, only a 
quarter of a mile long, on the Somme, twelve 



206 ITALY AT WAR 

horses sank so deeply in the mud that it was 
impossible to extricate them and they had to 
be shot. No wonder that the soldiers, going 
up to the trenches, prefer to leave their over- 
coats and blankets behind and face the misery 
of wet and cold rather than be burdened with 
the additional weight while struggling through 
the molasses-like mire. The only thing that 
they take up to the trenches which could by 
any stretch of the imagination be described 
as a comfort is whale-oil, carried in great jars, 
with which they rub their feet several times 
daily in order to prevent "trench feet.' , If 
you want to get a real idea of what the British 
infantryman has to endure during at least 
six months of the year, I would suggest that 
you strap on a pack-basket with a load of 
forty-two pounds, which is the weight of the 
British field equipment, tramp for ten hours 
through a ploughed field after a heavy rain, 
jump in a canal, and, without removing your 
clothes or boots, spend the night on a manure- 
pile in a barnyard. Then you will understand 
why soldiers become so heedless of gas, bullets, 
and shells. But with it all the British soldier 
remains incorrigibly cheerful. He is a born 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 207 

optimist and he shows it in his songs. Away 
back in the early months of the war he went 
into action to the lilt of "Tipperary." The 
gloom and depression of that first terrible win- 
ter induced in him a more serious mood, to 
which he gave vent in ' Onward, Christian 
Soldiers." But now he feels that victory, 
though still far off", is certain, and he puts his 
confidence into words: "Pack Up Your Troubles 
in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile," 
"Keep the Home Fires Burning," "When Irish 
Eyes Are Smiling," and "Hallelujah/ I'm a 
Hobo!" The latter very popular. Then 
there was another, adapted by the Salvation 
Army from an old music-hall tune, which I 
heard a battalion chanting lustily as it went 
slush-slushing up to the firing-line. It ran 
something like this: 

"The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling 
For you but not for me. 
For me the angels sing-a-ling-a-ling, 
They've got the goods for me. 
O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling, 
O Grave thy victoree ? 
The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling 
For you but not for me!" 



208 ITALY AT WAR 

It is almost impossible to make oneself be- 
lieve that, less than two years ago, these iron- 
hard, sun-bronzed, determined-looking men 
were keeping books, tending shop, waiting on 
table, driving wagons, and doing all the other 
humdrum things which make up the working 
lives of most of us. Yet this citizen army is 
winning sensational successes against the best 
trained troops in the world, occupying posi- 
tions of their own choosing, fortified and de- 
fended with every device that human ingenuity 
and years of experience have been able to sug- 
gest. These ex-shopkeepers, ex-tailors, ex-law- 
yers, ex-farmers, ex-cabmen are accomplishing 
what most military authorities asserted was 
impossible: they are driving German veterans 
out of trenches amply supported by artillery — 
and they are doing the job cheerfully and 
extremely well. 

I believe that one of the reasons why the 
morale of the British is so high is because, in- 
stead of adopting the dugout life of the Ger- 
mans, they have in the main kept to the open. 
Trench life is anything but pleasant, yet it is 
infinitely more conducive to confidence, cour- 
age, and enthusiasm than the rat-like existence 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 209 

of the Germans in foul-smelling, ill-lighted, un- 
sanitary burrows far beneath the surface of the 
ground. Few men can remain for month after 
month in such a place and retain their opti- 
mism and their self-respect. One of the Ger- 
man dugouts which I saw on the Somme was so 
deep in the earth that it had two hundred steps. 
The Germans who were found in it admitted 
quite frankly that after enjoying for several 
weeks or months the safety which it afforded, 
they had no stomach for going back to the 
trenches. They were only too glad to crawl 
into their hole when the British barrage began 
and there they were trapped and surrendered. 

Germany largely based her confidence of 
victory on the belief that, under the strain of 
war, the far-flung British Empire, with its 
heterogeneous elements and racial jealousies, 
would promptly crumble. It was a vital error. 
Instead of crumbling it hardened into a unity 
which is adamantine. Canada has already 
contributed half a million men to the British 
armies, Australia three hundred thousand. 
South Africa, by undertaking her own defense, 
released the imperial regiments stationed there. 
She not only suppressed the German-fomented 



210 ITALY AT WAR 

rebellion, but she conquered German South- 
west Africa and German East Africa, thus 
adding nearly a sixth of the Dark Continent 
to the Empire, and has sent ten thousand men 
to the battle-fields of Europe. Indian troops 
are fighting in France, in Macedonia, in Meso- 
potamia, in Palestine, and in Egypt. From 
the West Indies have come twelve thousand 
men. The Malay States gave to the Em- 
pire a battleship and a battalion. A little 
island in the Mediterranean raised the King's 
Own Malta Regiment. Uganda and Nyassa- 
land raised and supported the King's African 
Rifles — five thousand strong. The British col- 
onies on the other seaboard of the continent 
increased the West African Field Force to 
seven thousand men. The fishermen and lum- 
bermen from Newfoundland won imperishable 
glory on the Somme. From the coral atolls 
of the Fijis hastened six score volunteers. 
The Falkland Islands, south of South America, 
raised 140 men. From the Yukon, Sarawak, 
Wei-hai-wei, the Seychelles, Hong-Kong, Belize, 
Saskatchewan, Aden, Tasmania, British Guiana, 
Sierra Leone, St. Helena, the Gold Coast, 
poured Europeward, at the summons of the 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 211 

Motherland, an endless stream of fighting 
men. 

Scattered in trenches and tents, in barracks 
and billets over the whole of Northern France 
are men hailing from the uttermost parts of the 
earth. Some there are who have spent their 
lives searching for gold by the light of the Au- 
rora Borealis and others who have delved for 
diamonds on the South African veldt. Some 
have ridden range on the plains of Texas and 
others on the plains of Queensland. When, in 
the recreation huts, the phonograph plays 
"Homey Sweet Home" the thoughts of some 
drift to nipa-thatched huts on flaming tropic 
islands, some think of tin-roofed wooden 
cottages in the environs of Sydney or Mel- 
bourne, others of staid, old-fashioned, red- 
brick houses in Halifax or Quebec. 

Serving as a connecting-link between the 
British and the French and Belgian armies is 
a corps of interpreters known as the liaison. As 
there are well over two million Englishmen in 
France, a very small percentage of whom have 
any knowledge of French, the liaison enjoys 
no sinecure. To assist in the billeting of Brit- 
ish battalions in French villages, to conduct 



212 ITALY AT WAR 

negotiations with the canny countryfolk for 
food and fodder, to mollify angry housewives 
whose menages have been upset by boisterous 
Tommies billeted upon them, to translate 
messages of every description, to interrogate 
peasants suspected of espionage — these are only 
a few of the duties which the liaison officers are 
called upon to perform. The corps is recruited 
from Englishmen who have been engaged in 
business in Paris, habitues of the Riviera, stu- 
dents of the Latin Quarter, French hairdressers, 
head waiters, and ladies' tailors who have 
learned English "as she is spoke" in London's 
West End. The officers of the liaison can be 
readily distinguished by their caps, which re- 
semble those worn by railroad brakemen, and 
by the gilt sphinx on the collars of their drab 
uniforms. This emblem was chosen by Napo- 
leon as a badge for the corps of interpreters 
he organized during his Egyptian campaign, 
but the British unkindly assert it was selected 
for the liaison officers because nobody can un- 
derstand them. 

The more I see of the war the more I am im- 
pressed with its utter impersonality. It is a 
highly organized business, conducted by special- 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 213 

ists, and into it personalities and picturesque- 
ness seldom enter. One hears the noise and the 
clamor, of course; one sees the virility, the in- 
tense activity, the feverish haste, yet at the 
same time one realizes how little the human 
element counts; all is machinery and mathe- 
matics. I remember that one day I was lunch- 
ing in his dugout with an officer commanding a 
battery of heavy howitzers. Just as my host 
was serving the tinned peaches the telephone- 
bell jangled. It was an observation officer, up 
near the firing-line, reporting that through his 
telescope he had spotted a German ammunition 
column passing through a certain ruined hamlet 
three or four miles away. On his map the bat- 
tery commander showed me a small square, 
probably not more than three or four acres in 
extent, on which, in order to "get" that am- 
munition column, his shells must fall. Some 
rapid calculations on a pad of paper and, calling 
in his subordinate, he handed him the "arith- 
metic." A minute or two later, from a clump 
of trees close by, there came in rapid succession 
four splitting crashes and four invisible express- 
trains went screeching toward the German 
lines to explode, with the roar that scatters 



2i 4 ITALY AT WAR 

death, on a spot as far away and as invisible 
from me as Washington Square is from Grant's 
Tomb. Before the echo of the guns had died 
away my host was back to his tinned peaches 
again. Neither he, nor any of his gunners, 
knew, or ever would know, or, indeed, very 
greatly cared, what destruction those shells had 
wrought. That's what I mean by the imper- 
sonality of modern war. 

Our car stopped with startling abruptness in 
response to the upraised hand of a giant in 
khaki whose high-crowned sombrero and the 
brass letters on his shoulder-straps showed 
that he was a trooper of the Alberta Horse. 
On his arm was a red brassard bearing the 
magic letters M. P. — Military Police. 

"Better not go any farther, sir," he said, 
addressing the staff-officer who was my com- 
panion. "The Boches are shelling the road just 
ahead pretty heavily this morning. They got 
a lorry a few minutes ago and I've had orders 
to stop traffic until things quiet down a bit." 

"I'm afraid we'll have to take to the mud," 
said my cicerone resignedly. "And after last 
night's rain it will be beastly going. 




W2 ~ 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 215 

"And don't forget your helmet and gas- 
mask," he called, as I stepped from the car 
into a foot of oozy mire. 

"Will we need them?" I asked, for the in- 
verted wash-basin which the British dignify by 
the name of helmet is the most uncomfortable 
form of headgear ever devised by man. 

"It's orders," he answered. "No one is 
supposed to go into the trenches without mask 
and helmet. And there's never any telling 
when we may need them. No use in taking 
chances." 

Taking off my leather coat, which was too 
heavy for walking, I attempted to toss it into 
the car, but the wind caught it and carried it 
into the mud, in which it disappeared as quickly 
and completely as though I had dropped it in 
a lake. Leaving the comparative hardness of 
the road, we started to make our way to the 
mouth of a communication trench through 
what had evidently once been a field of sugar- 
beets — and instantly sank to our knees in mire 
that seemed to be a mixture of molasses, glue, 
and porridge. It seemed as though some sub- 
terranean monster had seized my feet with its 
tentacles and was trying to drag me down. 



2i6 ITALY AT WAR 

It was perhaps half a mile to the communica- 
tion trench and it took us half an hour of the 
hardest walking I have ever had to reach it. 
It had walls of slippery clay and a corduroyed 
bottom, but the corduroy was hidden beneath 
the mud left by thousands of feet. Telephone- 
wires, differentiated by tags of colored tape, 
ran down the sides. Shortly we came upon a 
working party of Highlanders who were repair- 
ing the trench-wall. The wars of the Middle 
Ages could have seen no more strangely cos- 
tumed fighting men. Above their half-puttees 
showed the brilliantly plaided tops of their 
stockings. Their kilts of green and blue tartan 
were protected by khaki aprons. Each man 
wore one of the recently issued jerkins, a sleeve- 
less and shapeless coat of rough-tanned sheep- 
skin such as was probably worn, in centuries 
past, by the English bowmen. On their heads 
were the "tin pot" helmets such as we were 
wearing, and in leather cases at their belts they 
carried broad-bladed and extremely vicious- 
looking knives. 

For nearly an hour we slipped and stumbled 
through the endless cutting. At one spot the 
parapet, soaked by water, had caved in. In 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 217 

the breach thus made had been planted a 
neatly lettered sign. It was terse and to the 
point: "The Hun sees you here. Go away." 
And we did. The trench had gradually been 
growing narrower and shallower and more 
tortuous until we were walking half doubled 
over so as not to show our heads above the top. 
At last it came to an end in a sort of cellar, 
perhaps six feet square, which had been bur- 
rowed from the ridge of a hill. The entrance 
to the observatory, for that is what it was, 
had been carefully screened by a burlap cur- 
tain; within a telescope, mounted on a tri- 
pod, applied its large and inquisitive eye to a 
small aperture, likewise curtained, cut in the 
opposite wall. We were in the advanced ob- 
servation post on the slopes of Notre Dame de 
Lorette, less than a thousand yards from the 
enemy. At the foot of the spur on which we 
stood ran the British trenches and, a few hun- 
dred yards beyond them, the German. From 
our vantage-point we could see the two lines, 
looking like monstrous brown snakes, extending 
for miles across the plain. Perhaps a mile be- 
hind the German trenches was a patch of red- 
brown roofs. It was the town of Lieven, a 



218 ITALY AT WAR 

straggling suburb of Lens, famous as the cen- 
tre of the mine-fields of Northern France. 

The only occupants of the observation post 
were a youthful Canadian lieutenant and a 
sergeant of the "Buzzers," as they call the Sig- 
nal Corps. The officer was from Montreal and 
he instantly became my friend when I spoke of 
golf at Dixie and rides in the woods back of 
Mount Royal and a certain cocktail which they 
make with great perfection in a certain club 
that we both knew. He adjusted the tele- 
scope and I put my eye to it, whereupon the 
streets of the distant town sprang into life 
before me. In front of a cottage a woman was 
hanging out washing — I could even make out 
the colors of the garments; a gray motor 
whirled into a square, stopped, a man alighted, 
and it went on again; a group of men — German 
soldiers doubtless — strolled across my field of 
vision and one of them paused for a moment as 
though to light a pipe; along a street straggled 
a line of children, evidently coming from school, 
for it must be remembered that in most of 
these French towns occupied by the Germans, 
even those close behind the lines, the civilian 
life goes on much as usual. Though the Allies 




U is 



AJT' 




4 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 219 

could blow these towns off the map if they 
wished, they do not bombard them save for 
some specific object, as to do so would be to 
kill many of their own people. Nor does it 
pay to waste ammunition on individual en- 
emies. But if an observation officer sees 
enough Germans in a group to make the ex- 
penditure of ammunition worth while, he will 
telephone to one of the batteries and a well- 
placed shell tells the Germans that street 
gatherings are strictly verboten. 

"Sorry that you weren't here yesterday," 
the lieutenant remarked. "We had a little 
entertainment of our own. Do you see that 
square?" and he swung the barrel of the tele- 
scope so that it commanded a cobble-paved 
place, with a small fountain in the centre, 
flanked on three sides by rows of red-brick 
dwellings. 

"I see it plainly," I told him. 

"The Boches are evidently billeting their 
men in those houses," he continued. "Yester- 
day morning an army baker's cart drove into 
the square and the soldiers came piling out of 
the houses to get their bread ration. There 
was quite a crowd of them around the cart, so I 



220 ITALY AT WAR 

phoned back to the gunners and they dropped 
a shell bang into the square. The soldiers 
scattered, of course, and the horse hitched to 
the cart took fright and ran away. The cart 
tipped over and the bread spilled out. After a 
few minutes the men came out of their cellars 
and began to gather up the bread, so we shelled 
'em again. The next time they sent out the 
women to pick up the loaves. We let them 
alone — French women, you understand — until 
I saw the Huns beating the women and taking 
the bread away from them. That made me 
mad and for ten minutes we strafed that section 
of the town good and plenty. It was very 
amusing while it lasted. And," he added wist- 
fully, "we don't get much amusement here." 

Darkness had fallen, when cold and tired, 
we climbed stiffly into the waiting car. As we 
tore down the long, straight road which led to 
General Headquarters the purple velvet of the 
eastern sky was stabbed by fiery flashes, many 
of them, and, borne on the night wind, came the 
sullen growling of the guns. As I stared out in- 
to the flame-pricked darkness there passed be- 
fore me in imaginary review that endless stream 



"CONTEMPTIBLE LITTLE ARMY" 221 

of dauntless and determined men — mud-caked 
infantrymen, gunners, despatch riders, sappers, 
pioneers, motor-drivers, road-menders, me- 
chanics, railway-builders — who form that wall 
of steel which Britain has thrown between 
Western Europe and the Hunnish hordes. Un- 
yielding and undiscouraged they have stood, for 
close on three years, in winter and in summer, 
in heat and in cold, in snow and in rain, hold- 
ing the frontier of civilization. And I knew 
that it was safe in their care. 



VIII 

WITH THE BELGIANS ON THE 
YSER 

I HAD left the Belgian army late in the 
autumn of 1914, just at the close of that 
series of heroic actions which began at 
Liege and ended on the Yser, so that my return, 
two years later, was in the nature of a home- 
coming. But it was a home-coming deeply 
tinged with sadness, for many, oh, so many 
of the gallant fellows with whom I had cam- 
paigned in those stirring days before the trench 
robbed war of its picturesqueness, were in Ger- 
man prisons or lay in unmarked and forgotten 
graves before Namur and Antwerp and Ter- 
monde. The Belgians that I had left were 
dirty, dog-tired, and disheartened. They were 
short of food, short of ammunition, short of 
everything save valor. The picturesque but 
impractical uniforms they wore — the green 
tunics and cherry-colored breeches of the 
Guides, the towering bearskins of the gen- 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 223 

darmes, the shiny leather hats of the Carabi- 
nieri — were foul with blood and dirt. 

As my car rolled across a canal bridge into 
that tiny triangle which is all that remains of 
free Belgium, a trim-looking trooper in khaki 
stepped from a sentry-box and, holding up an 
imperative hand, demanded to see my papers. 
Had it not been for the rosette of red-yei- 
low-and-black enamel on his cap, and the col- 
ored regimental facings on his collar, I should 
have taken him for a British soldier. 

"To what regiment do you belong ?" I asked 
him. 

"The First Guides, monsieur," he replied, 
returning my papers and saluting. 

The First Guides ! What memories the 
name brought back. How well I remembered 
the last time that I had seen those gallant 
riders, the pick and flower of the Belgian army, 
their comic-opera uniforms yellow with dust, 
crouching behind the hedgerows on the road to 
Alost, a pitifully thin screen of them, holding 
off the Germans while their weary comrades 
tramped northward into Flanders on the great 
retreat. It was not easy to make myself be- 
lieve that this smart, khaki-clad trooper before 



224 ITALY AT WAR 

me belonged to that homeless band of rear- 
guard fighters who had marked with their dead 
the line of retreat from the Meuse to the Yser. 

It was my first glimpse of the reconstituted 
Belgian army. In the two years that it has 
been holding the line on the Yser it has been 
completely reuniformed, re-equipped, reorgan- 
ized. The result is a small but complete 
and highly efficient organism. The Belgian 
army consists to-day of six infantry and two 
cavalry divisions — a total of about 120,000 
men — with perhaps another 80,000 being drilled 
in the various training camps at the rear. It 
has, of course, no great reserves to fall back 
upon, for the greater part of the nation is im- 
prisoned, but the King and his generals, by un- 
remitting energy, have produced a force which 
is as well disciplined and as completely equipped 
as can be found anywhere on the front. When 
the day comes, as it surely will, when Berlin 
issues the orders for a general retirement, I 
shouldn't care to be the Germans who are as- 
signed to the work of holding off" the Belgians, 
for from the men who wear the red-yellow-and- 
black rosettes they need expect no pity. 

Though the shortest of the lines held by the 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 225 

Allies, the Belgian front is, in proportion to the 
free Belgian population, much the longest. The 
northernmost sector of the Western Front, be- 
ginning at the sea and extending through Nieu- 
port, a distance of only three or four miles, is 
held by the French; then come the twenty- 
three miles held by the Belgians, another two 
or three miles held by the French, and then 
the British. The Belgians occupy a difficult 
and extremely uncomfortable position, for these 
Flemish lowlands were inundated in order to 
check the German advance, and as a result 
they are in the midst of a vast swamp, 
which, in the rainy season, becomes a lake. 
They are, in fact, fighting under conditions not 
encountered on any other front save in the 
Mazurian marshes. During the rainy season 
the gunners of certain batteries frequently 
work in water up to their waists. So wet is 
the soil that dugouts are out of the question, 
for they instantly become cisterns, so the Bel- 
gian engineers have developed a type of above- 
ground shelter which has concrete walls and 
a roof of steel rails, on top of which are laid 
several layers of sand-bags. Though these 
shelters afford their occupants protection from 



226 ITALY AT WAR 

the fire of small-caliber guns, they are not 
proof against the heavy projectiles which the 
Germans periodically rain upon the Belgian 
trenches. As the soil is so soft and slimy as 
to be useless for defensive purposes, the trench- 
walls are for the most part built of sand-bags, 
which are, however, usually filled with clay, 
for sand must be brought by incredible exer- 
tions from the seashore. I was shown a 
single short sector on the Yser, where six 
million bags were used. For the floors of these 
shelters, as well as for innumerable other pur- 
poses, millions of feet of lumber are required, 
which is taken up to the front over the net- 
work of light railways, some of which penetrate 
to the actual firing-line. If trench-building ma- 
terials are scarce in Flanders, fuel is scarcer. 
Every stick of wood and every piece of coal 
burned on the front has to be brought from 
great distances and at great expense, so econ- 
omy in fuel consumption is rigidly enforced. I 
remember walking through a trench with a 
Belgian officer one bitterly cold and rainy day 
last winter. In a corner of the trench a soldier 
in soaking clothes had piled together a tiny 
mound of twigs and roots and over the feeble 




M Z 




"5 & 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 227 

flame was trying to warm his hands, which 
were blue with cold. To my surprise my com- 
panion stopped and spoke to the man quite 
sharply. 

"We can't let one man have a fire all to him- 
self," he explained as he rejoined me. "Wood 
is too scarce for that. The fire that fellow had 
would have warmed three or four men and I 
had to reprimand him for building it." A mo- 
ment later he added: "The poor devil looked 
pretty cold, though, didn't he?" 

I had been informed by telephone from the 
Belgian Etat-Major that a staff-officer would 
meet me at a certain little frontier town whose 
name I have forgotten how to spell. After 
many inquiries and wrong turnings, for in this 
corner of Belgium the Flemish peasantry under- 
stand but little French and no English, my 
driver succeeded in finding the town, but the 
officer who was to meet me had not arrived. 
It was too cold to sit in the car with comfort, 
so a lieutenant of gendarmerie, the chief of the 
local Surete, invited me to make myself com- 
fortable in his little office. After a time the 
conversation languished, and, for want of some- 



228 ITALY AT WAR 

thing better to say, I inquired how far it was to 
Ostend. I was interested in knowing, because, 
during the retreat of the Belgian army in 
October, 1914, I left two kit-bags filled with 
perfectly good clothes at the American Con- 
sulate in Ostend. They are there still, I sup- 
pose, provided the Consulate has not been 
shelled to pieces by the British monitors or 
the bags stolen by German soldiers. 

"Ostend?" repeated the gendarme. "It 
isn't over thirty kilometres from here. From 
the roof of this building, if the weather was 
fine, you could almost see its church-spires." 

He walked across to the window and, press- 
ing his face against the pane, stared out across 
the fog-hung lowlands. He so stood for some 
minutes and when he turned I noticed that 
tears were glistening in his eyes. 

"My wife and children are over there in 
Ostend," he explained, in a voice which he tried 
pathetically hard to control. "At least, they 
were there two years ago last August. They 
had gone there for the summer. I was in Brus- 
sels when the Germans crossed the frontier, and 
I at once joined the army. I have never heard 
from my family since. It is Very 1 hard, mon- 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 229 

sieur, to be so near them — they are only thirty 
kilometres away — and not be able to see them 
or to hear from them, or even be able to learn 
whether they are well or whether they have 
enough to eat." 

It is a terrible thing, this prison wall within 
which the Germans have shut up the people of 
Belgium. How terrible it is one cannot realize 
until he has known those whose dear ones 
are confined incommunicado within that prison. 
I wish I might bring home to you, my friends, 
just what it means. How would you feel to 
stand on the banks of the Hudson and look 
across into New Jersey and know that, though 
over there, a few miles away, were your homes 
and those that you hold most dear, you could 
no more get word to them, or they to you, 
than if they were in Mars ? And how would 
you feel if you knew that Englewood and 
Morristown and Plainfield and the Oranges, 
and a dozen other of the pretty Jersey towns, 
were but heaps of blackened ruins, that the 
larger cities were garrisoned by brutal German 
soldiery and ruled by heartless German gover- 
nors, and that thousands of women and girls 
— perhaps your wife, your daughters among 



2 3 o ITALY AT WAR 

them — had been dragged from their homes 
and taken God knows where ? How would 
you feel then, Mr. American ? 

After an hour's wait my officer, profuse in his 
apologies, arrived in a beautifully appointed 
limousine, beside which the British stafF-car in 
which I had come looked cheap and very 
shabby. At the very beginning of the war 
the Belgian military authorities commandeered 
every car they could lay their hands on, and 
though many have been worn out and hundreds 
were lost during the retreat, they are still rather 
better supplied with luxurious cars than any of 
the other armies. 

"There will be a moon to-night," said my 
cicerone, "so before going to La Panne, where 
quarters have been reserved for you, I shall 
take you to Furnes. The Grande Place is pure 
Spanish — it was built in the Duke of Alva's 
time, you know — and it is very beautiful by 
moonlight." 

The road to Furnes took us through what had 
been, a few years before, quaint Flemish vil- 
lages, but German Kultur, aided by the prod- 
ucts of Frau Bertha Krupp, had transformed 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 231 

the beautiful sixteenth-century architecture into 
heaps of brick and stone. And nowhere did I 
see a church left standing. Whether the Ger- 
mans shelled the churches because they honestly 
believed that their towers were used for obser- 
vation purposes, or from sheer lust for destruc- 
tion, I do not know. In any event, the churches 
are gone. In one little shell-torn village my 
companion pointed out to me the ruins of a 
church, amid which a company of infantry, 
going up to the trenches, had camped for the 
night. Just as the men were falling in at day- 
break a German shell of large caliber exploded 
among them. Sixty-four — I think that was the 
number — were killed outright or died of their 
wounds. But not even the dead are permitted 
to sleep in peace. I saw several churchyards 
on which German shells had rained so heavily 
that the corpses had been disinterred, and 
whitened bones and grinning skulls littered 
the ploughed-up ground. 

Darkness had fallen when we came to Furnes. 
In passing through the outskirts, we stopped 
to call on two young women — an Irish girl 
and a Canadian — who, undismayed by the 
periodic shell-storms which visit it, have pluck- 



232 ITALY AT WAR 

ily stayed in the town ever since the battle 
of the Yser, caring for the few hundred towns- 
people who remain, nursing the wounded, and 
even conducting a school for the children. They 
live in a small bungalow which the military 
authorities have erected for them on the edge 
of the town. A few yards from their front door 
is a bomb-proof, looking exactly like a Kansas 
cyclone-cellar, in which they find refuge when 
one of the frequent bombardments begins. 
We found that the young women were not at 
home. I was disappointed, because I wanted 
to tell them how much I admired them. 

My companion was quite right in saying that 
the Grande Place of Furnes by moonlight is 
worth seeing. It certainly is. The exquisite 
fifteenth-century buildings which face upon the 
square have, by some miracle, remained almost 
undamaged. There were no lights, of course, 
and the only person in sight was a sentry, on 
whose bayonet and steel helmet the moonbeams 
played fitfully. The darkness, the silence, the 
suggestion of mystery, the ancient buildings 
with their leaded windows and their carved 
facades, the steel-capped soldier, all made 
me feel that I had stepped back five hundred 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 233 

years and was in the Furnes of Inquisition 
times. 

Our visit to Furnes had delayed us, so it was 
well into the evening before we drew up before 
the hotel in La Panne, where a room had been 
reserved for me by the Belgian Etat-Major. 
A seaside resort in midwinter is always a pe- 
culiarly depressing place, and La Panne was 
no exception. Though every hotel and villa 
in the place was chock-a-block with staff- 
officers, with nurses, and with wounded, the 
street-lamps were extinguished, not a ray 
of light escaped from the heavily curtained 
windows, and, to add to the general sense of 
melancholy, a cold, raw wind was blowing 
down from the North Sea and a drizzling rain 
had set in. Though La Panne is within easy 
range of the German batteries, which could 
eliminate it with neatness and despatch, it 
has, singularly enough, never been bombarded, 
nor has it been subjected to any serious air 
raids. This is the more surprising as all the 
neighboring towns, as well as Dunkirk, a dozen 
miles beyond, have been repeatedly shelled 
and bombed. The only explanation of this 
phenomenon is that the Germans do not wish 



234 ITALY AT WAR 

to kill the Queen of the Belgians — she was 
Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria, remember — who 
lives with the King at La Panne. It is pos- 
sible that this may be the correct explanation. 
I remember that when I was in Brussels dur- 
ing the early days of the German occupation, 
there occurred a serious collision between 
Prussian and Bavarian troops, the latter as- 
serting that the ill-mannered North German 
soldiery had shown some disrespect to a por- 
trait of "unsere Bayerische Prinzessin." Why 
the Germans should have any consideration 
for the safety of the Queen after the fashion in 
which they have treated her country and her 
people, only a Teutonic intellect could under- 
stand. But the exemption which La Panne 
has thus far enjoyed has not induced its in- 
habitants to omit any precautions. An am- 
ple number of bomb-proofs and dugouts have 
been constructed, and at night over all the 
windows are tacked thick black curtains. For 
they know the Germans. 

La Panne is the last town on the Belgian lit- 
toral before you reach the French frontier and 
the last villa in the town is occupied by the 
King and Queen. It stands amid the sand- 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 235 

dunes, looking out across the Channel toward 
England. It is just such a square, plastered, 
eight-room villa as might be rented for the 
summer months by a family with an income of 
five thousand a year. The sentries who are 
on duty at its gates and the mounted gen- 
darmes who constantly patrol its immediate 
vicinity, are the only signs that it is the resi- 
dence of royalty. Almost any morning you can 
see the King and Queen — he tall and soldierly, 
with all griefs and anxieties which the war has 
brought him showing in his face; she small and 
trim and girlishly slender — riding on the hard 
sands of the beach, or strolling, unaccompanied, 
amid the dunes. What must it mean to them 
to know that though over there to the eastward 
lies Belgium, their Belgium, they cannot ride 
five miles toward it before they are halted by 
the German bar; to know that beyond that 
little river where the trenches run their people 
are suffering and waiting for help, and that, 
after nearly three years, they are not a yard 
nearer to them ? 

How clearly I remembered the last time that 
I had seen the Queen. It was in the Hotel St. 
Antoine, in Antwerp, the night before the flight 



236 ITALY AT WAR 

of the Government and the royal family to Os- 
tend, and less than a week before the fall of the 
city itself. For days past the grumble of the 
guns had constantly been growing louder, the 
streams of wounded had steadily increased; 
every one knew that the end was almost at 
hand. It was just before the dinner-hour and 
the great lobby of the hotel was crowded with 
officers — Belgian, French, and British — with 
members of the fugitive Government and Dip- 
lomatic Corps, and a few unofficial foreigners 
like myself. Then, unannounced and unac- 
companied, the Queen entered. She had come 
to say farewell to the invalid wife of the Rus- 
sian Minister, who was unable to go to the pal- 
ace. She remained in the Russians' apartments 
(during the bombardment, a few days later, 
they were completely wrecked by a German 
shell) half an hour, perhaps. Then she came 
down the winding stairs, a pathetically girlish 
figure in the simplest of white suits, leaning on 
the arm of the gallant old diplomat. Quite 
automatically the throng in the lobby sepa- 
rated, so as to form an aisle down which she 
passed. To those of us who were nearest she 
put out her hand and, bending low, we kissed 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 237 

it. Then the great doors were opened and 
she passed out into the darkness and the rain 
— a Queen without a country. 

No one comes away from La Panne, at least 
no one should, without having visited the great 
hospital founded by Dr. Leon du Page, the 
famous Belgian surgeon. It started in one of 
the big tourist hotels facing on the sea, but it has 
gradually expanded until it now occupies a 
whole congeries of buildings. It has upward of 
a thousand beds, but, as the fighting was com- 
paratively light at the time I was there, only 
about two-thirds of them were occupied. 
Though the American Ambulance at Neuilly, 
and some of the hospitals at the British base- 
camps are larger, Dr. du Page's hospital is the 
most complete and self-contained that I have 
seen on any front. To mend the broken men 
who are brought there no device of medical 
science has been left untried. There are giant 
magnets which are used to draw minute steel 
fragments from the brains of men wounded by 
shrapnel; there are beds, heated by hundreds of 
electric lights, for soldiers whose vitality has 
been dangerously lowered by shock or exhaus- 



238 ITALY AT WAR 

tion; there is a department of facial surgery 
where men who have lost their noses or their 
jaws or even their faces are given new ones. 
The hospital is, as I have said, self-contained. 
The operating-tables, the beds, all the furniture, 
in fact, is made on the premises. It is the only 
hospital I know of which provides those pa- 
tients who have lost their legs with artificial 
limbs. And they are by far the best artificial 
limbs that I have seen anywhere. Each one is 
made to order to match the man's remaining 
limb. They are shaped over plaster casts, 
according to a system orginated by Dr. du 
Page, in alternate layers of glue and ordinary 
shavings, and the articulation of the joints 
almost equals that of nature. As a result the 
soldiers are sent out into the world provided 
with legs which are symmetrical, almost un- 
breakable, amazingly light, and so admirably 
constructed that the owner rarely requires 
the assistance of a cane. Another detail for 
which Dr. du Page has made provision is the 
manufacture of his own instruments. Before 
the war the best surgical instruments were 
made in Germany. There were, so far as Dr. 
du Page knew, only five first-class instrument- 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 239 

makers in Belgium. Three of these were, he 
ascertained, in the army, so through the King 
he obtained their release from military duty. 
Now they work in a completely equipped shop 
in the rear of the hospital making the shiny, 
terrifying instruments which the white-clad 
surgeons wield with such magical effect. 

Should you feel like giving up the theatre 
this evening, or taking a street-car instead of 
a taxi, or not opening that bottle of champagne, 
the money would be very welcome to Dr. du 
Page and his wounded. Should you feel that 
that is too much to give, it might be well for 
you to remember that he has given something, 
too. He gave his wife. She was returning 
from America, where she had gone to collect 
funds to carry on the work of the hospital. 
She sailed on the Lusitania. . . . 

To reach the Belgian firing-line is not easy 
because, the country being as flat as a ballroom 
floor, the Germans see and shoot at you. So 
one needs to be cautious. So dangerous is the 
terrain in this respect that the ambulances and 
motor-lorries and ammunition-trains could not 
get up to the trenches at all had not the Bel- 



2 4 o ITALY AT WAR 

gians, with great foresight, done wholesale tree- 
planting. Most people do not number nursery 
work among the duties of an army, but nowa- 
days it is. From France and England the Bel- 
gians imported many saplings, thousands if not 
tens of thousands of them, and set them out 
along the roads exposed to German fire, and 
now their foliage forms a screen behind which 
troops and transport can move with compara- 
tive safety. In places where trees would not 
grow the roads have been masked for miles with 
screens made from branches. To have one of 
these screens between you and the Germans is 
very comforting. 

Oh our way up to the front we made a detour 
in order that I might call on a friend, Mrs. A. D. 
Winterbottom, who, before her marriage to a 
British officer, was Miss Appleton of Boston. 
In "Fighting in Flanders" I told about a 
very brave deed which I saw performed by 
Mrs. Winterbottom. She was quite angry 
with me for mentioning it, but because she is 
an American of whom her countrypeople have 
every reason to be proud, I am going to tell 
about it again. It was during the last days of 
the siege of Antwerp. The Germans had me- 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 241 

thodically pounded to pieces with their great 
guns the chain of barrier forts encircling the 
city. Waelhem was one of the last to fall. 
When at length the remnant of the garrison 
evacuated the fort they brought back word that 
a score of their comrades, too badly wounded 
to walk, remained within the battered walls. 
So Mrs. Winterbottom, who had brought over 
from England her big touring-car and was 
driving it herself, said quietly that she was 
going to bring them out. The only way to 
reach the fort was by a straight and narrow 
road, a mile long, on which German shells 
were bursting with great accuracy and fre- 
quency. To me and to the Belgian officers 
who were with me, it looked like a short-cut 
to the cemetery. But that didn't deter Mrs. 
Winterbottom. She climbed into her car and 
threw in the clutch and jammed her foot down 
on the accelerator, and went tearing down 
that shell-spattered highway at top speed. 
She filled her car with wounded men and 
brought them safely back, and then returned 
and gathered up the others who were still 
alive. I have seen few braver deeds. 
Mrs. Winterbottom remained with the Bel- 



242 ITALY AT WAR 

gian army throughout the great retreat into 
Flanders, and when it settled down into the 
trench life on the Yser, she was officially at- 
tached to a division, with which she has re- 
mained ever since, moving when her division 
moves. She lives in a one-room shack which 
the soldiers have built her immediately in the 
rear of the trenches and within range of the 
enemy's guns. Her only companion is a dog, 
yet she is as safe as though she were on Beacon 
Hill, for she is the idol of the soldiers. She 
has a large recreation tent, like the side-show 
tent of a circus, but painted green to escape 
the attention of the German airmen, and in 
this tent she entertains the men during their 
brief periods of leave from the trenches. She 
gives them coffee, cocoa, milk, and biscuits; 
she provides them with writing materials — I 
forget how many thousand sheets of paper and 
envelopes she told me that they used each 
week; and she keeps them supplied with read- 
ing matter. Three times a week she gives 
"her boys" a phonograph concert in the first- 
line trenches. You must have experienced 
the misery and monotony of existence in the 
trenches to understand what these "concerts" 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 243 

mean to the tired and homesick men. I asked 
her if there was anything that the people at 
home could send her, and she replied rather 
hesitantly (for she is personally bearing the 
entire expense of this work) that she under- 
stood that some small metal phonographs 
were procurable which could easily be carried 
about and would not warp from dampness, for 
the trenches on the Yser are very wet. She 
also said that she would welcome phonograph 
records of any description and French books. 
The last I saw of her she was wading through 
a sea of mud, in rubber boots and a rubber 
coat and a sou'wester, to carry her "canned 
music" to the men on the firing-line. They 
ought to be very proud of Mrs. Winterbottom 
back in her own home town. 

The Belgian trenches are very much like 
those on other sectors of the Western Front, 
except that they are made of sand-bags instead 
of earth, are muddier and are nearer the enemy, 
being separated from the German positions, for 
a considerable distance, only by the Yser, which 
in places is only forty yards across. In fact, a 
baseball player could easily sling a stone across 
the river into Dixmude, or what remains of it, 



244 ITALY AT WAR 

for, like most of the other Flemish towns, it is 
now only a blackened skeleton. Many cities 
have been destroyed in the course of this war, 
but none of them, unless it be Ypres, so nearly 
approaches complete obliteration as Dixmude. 
Pompeii is a living, breathing city compared to 
it. Despite all that has been printed about 
the devastation in the war zone, I believe that 
when the war is over and the hordes of curious 
Americans flock Europeward, they will be 
stunned by the completeness of the desolation 
which the Germans have wrought in north- 
eastern France and Belgium. 

By far the most interesting day I spent on the 
Belgian front was not in the trenches but in a 
long, low, wooden building well to the rear. 
Over the door was a sign which read: "Section 
Photographique de l'Armee Beige." Here are 
brought to be developed and enlarged and scru- 
tinized the hundreds of photographs which are 
taken daily by Belgian aviators flying over the 
German lines. In no department of war work 
has there been greater progress during recent 
months than in photography by airplane. 
Every morning at break of dawn scores of Bel- 
gian machines — and the same is true all down 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 245 

the Western Front — rise into the air, and for 
hour after hour swoop and circle over the en- 
emy's lines, taking countless photographs of his 
positions by means of specially made cameras 
fitted with telescopic lenses. (The Allied fliers 
on the Somme took seventeen hundred photo- 
graphs during a single day.) Most of these 
photographs are taken at a height of eight 
thousand to ten thousand feet,* though very 
much lower, of course, when an opportunity 
presents itself, and always with the camera as 
nearly vertical as possible. As soon as an avi- 
ator has secured a sufficient number of pictures 
of the locality or object which he has been or- 
dered to photograph, he wings his way back to 
his own lines, the plates are immediately devel- 
oped at the headquarters of the Section Photo- 
graphique or in a dark room on wheels. If 
the first examination of the negative reveals 

* In order to keep pace with the steady improvement in range 
and accuracy of anti-aircraft artillery, aviators have found it 
necessary to operate at constantly increasing altitudes, so that 
it is now not uncommon for aerial combats to be fought at a 
height of 20,000 feet. Hence, many airplanes are now equipped 
with oxygen-bags for use in the rarefied atmosphere of the higher 
levels. The aviators operating on the Italian front experience 
such intense cold during the winter months that a system has 
been evolved for heating their caps, gloves, and boots by elec- 
tricity generated by the motor. 



246 ITALY AT WAR 

anything of interest, it is at once enlarged, 
often to eight times the size of the original. As 
a result of this remarkable system of aerial 
espionage, there is nothing of importance which 
the Germans can long conceal from the Allies. 
They cannot extend their trench lines by so 
much as a yard, they cannot construct new 
positions, they cannot mount a machine-gun 
without the fact being registered by those eyes 
which, from dawn to dark, peer down at them 
from the clouds. At all of the divisional head- 
quarters are large plans of the opposing enemy 
trenches, which are corrected daily by means of 
these airplane photographs and by the informa- 
tion collected through the elaborate system of 
espionage which the Allies maintain behind the 
German lines. To deceive the aerial observers, 
each side resorts to all manner of ingenious 
tricks. To suggest an impending retirement, 
columns of men are marched down the roads 
which lead to the rear; trenches which are not 
intended to be used are dug; and there are, of 
course, hundreds of dummy guns, some of which 
actually fire. The officer in command of the 
Belgian Photographic Section had heard that I 
was in Dunkirk in May, 1915, when it was 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 247 

shelled by a German naval gun, at a range of 
twenty-three and one-half miles.* So he gave 
me as a souvenir of the experience a photo- 
graph, taken from the air, of the gun emplace- 
ment after it had been discovered and bombed 
by the Allied aviators, and the gun removed 
to a place of safety. I reproduce the photo- 
graph herewith. The numerous white spots all 
about the emplacement are the craters caused 
by the bombs which were rained upon it. 

Another of these monster guns was so in- 
geniously concealed in an imitation thicket 
that for a fortnight or more it defied the efforts 
of scores of airmen to locate it. Though hun- 
dreds of airplane photographs of the country 
behind the German trenches were brought in 
and minutely examined, there was nothing 
about them to suggest the hiding-place of a 
gun of so large a caliber until some one called 
attention to the deep ruts left by motor-trucks 
which had left the highway at a certain point 
and turned into the innocent-looking patch 
of woods. Why were the wheel-ruts shown on 
the plate so black ? Because the vehicle must 

* For an account of this, the longest-range bombardment in 
history, see Mr. PowellVVive la France!" 



248 ITALY AT WAR 

have sunk deep into the soft soil. Why did it 
sink so deeply ? Because it was heavily laden. 
Laden with what ? With large-caliber shells, 
perhaps. But still it was only a supposition. 
A few days later, however, it was noticed that 
at a certain point on the westward edge of 
that patch of woods there seemed to be a slight 
discoloration. This discoloration became more 
pronounced on later photographs which were 
brought in. Every one in the Section Photo- 
graphique hazarded a guess as to its cause. 
At length some one suggested that it looked 
as though the leaves of the trees had been 
burned. But what burned them ? There was 
only one answer. The fiery blast from a big 
gun hidden amid those trees, of course ! Act- 
ing on that hypothesis, a score of aviators 
were sent out with orders to pour upon the 
wood a torrent of high explosive. The next 
few hours must have been very uncomfortable 
for the German gun-crew. In any event, the 
big piece was hauled out of danger under 
cover of darkness and the bombardments of 
the towns behind the Belgian lines abruptly 
ceased. 
The Allied air service does not confine its ob- 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 249 

servations to the trenches; it keeps an ever- 
wakeful eye on all that is in progress in the 
regions for many miles behind the front. To 
illustrate how little escapes the eye of the cam- 
era, the officer in charge of the Photographic 
Section showed me a series of photographs which 
had been taken of a village at the back of Dix- 
mude, a few days previously, from a height of 
more than a mile. The first picture showed 
an ordinary Flemish village with its gridiron 
of streets and buildings. Cutting diagonally 
across the picture was a straight white streak 
which I knew to be a road leading into the coun- 
try. At one point on this road were a number 
of tiny squares — evidently a row of workmen's 
cottages. The commandant handed me a pow- 
erful magnifying-glass. "Look very closely on 
that road," he said, "and you will see three 
specks." I saw them. They were about the 
size of pin-points. 

"Those are three men," he continued. "The 
man at the right lives in the first of this row of 
cottages. The man in the middle lives in the 
fourth house in the row. But the man at the 
left is a farmer, and lives in this isolated farm- 
house out here in the country." 



250 ITALY AT WAR 

"A very clever guess," I remarked, scepti- 
cism showing in my tone, I fear. 

"We do not guess in this business," he 
replied reprovingly. "We know?' And he 
handed me the next photograph, taken a few 
seconds later. There was no doubt about it; 
the pin-point of a man at the right had left his 
two companions and was turning in at the first 
of the row of cottages. Another photograph 
was produced. It showed the second man 
entering the gate of the fourth cottage. And 
the final picture of the series showed the re- 
maining speck plodding on alone toward his 
home in the country. 

"An officer of some importance is evidently 
making this house his headquarters," remarked 
the commandant, indicating another tiny rec- 
tangle. "If he wasn't of some importance he 
wouldn't have a telephone." 

"Good heavens!" I exclaimed. "You don't 
mean to tell me that you can photograph a tele- 
phone-wire from a mile in the air ?" 

"Not quite," he admitted, "but sometimes, if 
the light happens to be right, we can get photo- 
graphs of its shadow." 

And sure enough, stretching across the 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 251 

ploughed fields, I could see, through the glass, 
a phantom line, intersected at regular inter- 
vals by short and somewhat thicker lines. 
It was the shadow of a field-telephone and its 
poles ! And the airplane from which that pho- 
tograph was taken was so high that it must 
have looked like a mere speck to one on the 
ground. There's war magic for you. 

You will ask, of course, why the Germans 
don't maintain over the Allied lines a similar 
system of aerial observation. They do — when 
the Allies let them. But the Allies now have in 
commission on the Western Front such an 
enormous number of aircraft — I think I have 
said elsewhere the French alone probably have 
close to seven thousand machines — and they 
have made such great improvements in their 
anti-aircraft guns that to-day it is a com- 
paratively rare thing to see a German flier 
over territory held by the Allies. The mo- 
ment that a German flier takes the air, half 
a dozen Allied airmen rise to meet and engage 
him, and, in the rare event of his being able to 
elude them and get over the Allied lines, the 
"Archies," as the anti-aircraft guns are called 
on the British front, get into noisy action. 



252 ITALY AT WAR 

(Their name, it is said, came from a London 
music-hall song which was exceedingly popular 
at the beginning of the war. When the shells 
from the German A. A. guns burst harmlessly 
around the British airmen they would hum 
mockingly the concluding line of the song: 
"Archibald, certainly not!") Unable to keep 
their fliers in the air, the Germans are to all 
intents and purposes blind. They are unable 
to regulate the fire of their artillery or to direct 
their infantry attacks; they do not know what 
damage their shells are doing; and they have 
no means of learning what is going on behind 
the enemy's lines. It is obvious, therefore, 
that to have and keep control of the air is a 
very, very important thing. 

No one who has been in Europe during the 
past two years can have failed to notice the 
unpopularity of the Belgians among the French 
and English. This is regrettable but true. 
Also it is unjust. When I left Belgium in the 
late autumn of 191 4 the Belgians were looked 
on as a nation of heroes. They were acclaimed 
as the saviors of Europe. Nothing was too 
good for them. The sight of a Belgian uniform 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 253 

in the streets of London or Paris was the sig- 
nal for a popular ovation. When the red-black- 
and-yellow banner was displayed on the stage 
of a music-hall the audience rose en masse. 
The story of the defense of Liege sent a thrill of 
admiration round the world. But in the two 
and a half years that have passed since then 
there has become noticeable among French and 
English — particularly among the English — a 
steadily growing dislike for their Belgian allies; 
a dislike which has, in certain quarters, grown 
into a thinly veiled contempt. I have repeat- 
edly heard it asserted that the Belgian has been 
spoiled by too much charity, that he is lazy and 
ungrateful and complaining, that he has become 
a professional pauper, that he has been greatly 
overrated as a fighter, and that he has had 
enough of the war and is ready to quit. 

The truth of the matter is this: The majority 
of the Belgians who fled before the advancing 
Germans belonged to the lower classes; they 
were for the most part uneducated and lacking 
in mental discipline. Is it any wonder, then, 
that they gave way to blind panic when the 
stories of the barbarities practised by the in- 
vaders reached their ears, or that their heads 



254 ITALY AT WAR 

were turned by the hysterical enthusiasm, the 
lavish hospitality, with which they were re- 
ceived in England ? That as a result of being 
thus lionized, many of these ignorant and mer- 
curial people became fault-finding and over- 
bearing, there is no denying. Nor can it be 
truthfully gainsaid that, for a year or more 
after the war began, there hung about the 
London restaurants and music-halls a number 
of young Belgians who ought to have been 
with their army on the firing-line. But, if 
my memory serves me rightly, I think that I 
saw quite a number of English youths doing 
the same thing. Every country has its slackers, 
and Belgium is no exception. But to attempt 
to belittle the glorious heroism of the Belgian 
nation because of a few young slackers or the 
ingratitude and ill-manners of some ignorant 
peasants, is an unworthy and despicable thing. 
The assertion that the Belgians are lacking 
in courage is as untruthful as it is cruel. Ask 
the Germans who charged up the fire-swept 
slopes of Liege — those of them left alive — if 
the Belgians are cowards. Ask those who 
saw the fields of Aerschot and Vilvorde and 
Termonde and Malines strewn with Belgian 



THE BELGIANS ON THE YSER 255 

dead. Go stand for a few days — and nights — 
beside the Belgians who are holding those 
mud-filled trenches on the Yser. And re- 
member that the Belgians were fighting while 
the English were still only talking about it. 
Nor forget that, had not their heroic resistance 
given France a breathing-spell in which to 
complete her tardy mobilization, the Germans 
would now, in all probability, be in Paris. 
The truth is that the civilized world owes to 
the Belgians a debt which it can never repay. 
We of America are honored to be counted 
among their Allies. 



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